91288819 Tosh Pursuit Of History 5th Ed

FIFTH EDITION

The Pursuit of History

The Pursuit
of History

Aims, methods and new directions in the
study of modern history

FIFTH EDITION

John Tosh

Longman
is an imprint of

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First published 1984
Second edition 1991
Third edition 1992
Fourth edition 1996

Fifth edition published in Great Britain 2010

© Pearson Education Limited 1984, 2010

The right of John Tosh to be identified as author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN: 978-0-582-89412-9

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Tosh, John.

The pursuit of history : aims, methods, and new directions in the study of
modern history / John Tosh. - 5th ed.
p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-582-89412-9 (pbk.)

1. Historiography. 2. Great Britain-Historiography. I. Title.

D13.T62 2010
907.2'041-dc22

2009043558

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Contents

Preface to the Fifth Edition

viii

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

xii

1

Historical awareness

1

2

The uses of history

29

3

Mapping the field

58

4

The raw materials

88

5

Using the sources

119

6

Writing and interpretation

147

7

The limits of historical knowledge

175

8

History and social theory

214

9

Cultural evidence and the cultural turn

246

1 0

Gender history and postcolonial history

274

1 1

Memory and the spoken word

303

Conclusion

330

Index

335

For Nick and Will

Preface to the Fifth Edition

T he word history carries two meanings in common parlance.

It refers both to what actually happened in the past and to
the representation of that past in the work of historians. This
book is an introduction to history in the second sense. It is
intended for anyone who is sufficiently interested in the subject to
wonder how historical enquiry is conducted and what purpose it
fulfils. More specifically, the book is addressed to students taking
a degree course in history, for whom these questions have par-
ticular relevance.

Traditionally history undergraduates were offered no formal
instruction in the nature of their chosen discipline; its time-
honoured place in our literary culture and its non-technical
presentation suggested that common sense combined with a sound
general education would provide the student with what little ori-
entation he or she required. This approach leaves a great deal to
chance. It is surely desirable that students consider the functions
served by a subject to which they are about to devote three years
of study or more. Curriculum choice will be a hit-and-miss affair
unless based on a clear grasp of the content and scope of present-
day historical scholarship. Above all, students need to be aware
of the limits placed on historical knowledge by the character of
the sources and the working methods of historians, so that at an
early stage they can develop a critical approach to the formidable
array of secondary authorities that they are required to master. It
is certainly possible to complete a degree course in history without
giving systematic thought to any of these issues, and generations
of students have done so. But most universities now recognize
that the value of historical study is thereby diminished, and they

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

therefore provide introductory courses on the methods and scope
of history. I hope that this book will meet the needs of students
taking such a course.

Although my own research experience has been in the fields of
African history and gender in modern Britain, it has not been my
intention to write a manifesto for ‘the new history’. I have tried
instead to convey the diversity of current historical practice, and
to situate recent innovations in the context of mainstream trad-
itional scholarship, which continues to account for a great deal
of first-rate historical work and to dominate academic syllabuses.
The scope of historical studies is today so wide that it has not
been easy to determine the precise range of this book; but without
some more or less arbitrary boundaries an introductory work of
this length would lose all coherence. I therefore say nothing about
the history of science or environmental history, and there are
only passing references to the history of the body and the history
of consumption. In general I have confined my choice to those
themes that are widely studied by students today.

Even within these limits, however, my territory is something
of a minefield. Anyone who imagines that an introduction to the
study of history will express a consensus of expert opinion needs
to be promptly disabused. One of the distinguishing features of
the profession is its heated arguments concerning the objectives
and limitations of historical study. This book inevitably reflects
my own views, and it is appropriate to declare them at the outset.
The salient points are: that history is a subject of practical social
relevance; that the proper performance of its function depends
on a receptive and discriminating attitude to other disciplines;
and that the methods of academic history hold out the promise
not of ‘truth’ in an absolute sense, but of incremental growth in
our knowledge of the past. At the same time, I have tried to place
these claims - none of which is of course original - in the context
of recent debate among historians, and to give a fair hearing to
views with which I disagree.

This book explores a number of general propositions about
history and historians, rather than providing a point of entry
into any one field or specialism. But since I anticipate that most
of my readers will be more familiar with British history than any
other, I have relied for my illustrative material mostly on that
field, with some additional examples from Africa, Europe and the
United States. The book is meant to be read as a whole, but I have

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

included a certain amount of cross-referencing in the text to assist
the reader who wishes to pursue specific themes.

The book is intended to take the reader from first principles
through to some of the latest debates about the direction histor-
ical study is taking. Chapter 1 considers what it means to think
historically. Chapter 2 reviews the debate about whether history
has any use beyond human curiosity about the past. Chapter 3
seeks to categorize the many and varied kinds of study that sail
under the banner of ‘history’. Then follow two chapters (4 and
5) that itemize and analyse written primary sources. Chapter 6
examines the different kinds of writing through which historians
communicate their findings. Chapter 7 reviews the intense debates
that have arisen about the truth claims of history, paying special
attention to Postmodernism. The remainder of the book describes
a number of specific approaches to history, all informed to a
greater or lesser degree by theory. Chapter 8 considers Marxism
and other kinds of social theory; Chapter 9 evaluates the contri-
bution of cultural sources and the broader reorientation known
as the ‘cultural turn’. Chapter 10 deals with gender history and
postcolonial history. Finally, Chapter 11 considers the relation-
ship between history and memory, including oral history.

Anyone familiar with previous editions will want to know
what is different about this one. There are substantial changes.
My survey of the main themes of history has been reorganized
and placed earlier in the book (Chapter 3). There are sections on
global history (Chapter 3) and comparative history (Chapter 6).
The ever-widening scope of cultural history is more fully explored
in Chapter 9. In the previous edition postcolonialism was men-
tioned in passing, but now receives half a chapter (Chapter 10).
The treatment of women’s and gender history has been brought
together in one place (also Chapter 10). I have recast my coverage
of oral history, linking it more closely with the recent scholarship
on memory (Chapter 11). At the same time, these additions have
not resulted in a longer text, since my goal remains to provide a
succinct introduction to the discipline. The flip side of innova-
tion is that yesterday’s themes may count for less today. I have
therefore made excisions. The chapter on quantitative history has
been dropped, but the topic briefly appears in Chapters 5 and 8.
Marxist history has been cut down to size, though it remains an
important theme (Chapter 8). Oral tradition (as distinct from oral

PREFACE TO THE FIFTH EDITION

history) has likewise been trimmed (Chapter 11). Elsewhere I have
updated the text and the reference material at numerous points.

In ranging so far beyond any one person’s experience of
research and writing, this book is more dependent than most
on the help of other scholars. Earlier editions record my intel-
lectual debts. This latest edition has benefited from the advice of
Peter Edwards, Carrie Hamilton, Paula Hamilton, Karen Harvey,
Krisztina Robert, John Seed and Caroline White.

I am particularly grateful to Sean Lang: he devised the student
aids in the fourth edition, and I have incorporated them here in
the same house style, with some additions.

John Tosh
May 2009

Publisher’s

Acknowledgements

The publisher would like to thank the following for their kind
permission to reproduce their photographs:

Page 4 Bridgeman Art Library Ltd: Capitol Collection, Washington,
USA / The Bridgeman Art Library; Page 14 Getty Images: AFP.
Page 18 Getty Images: Hulton Archive; Page 40 TopFoto: Image
Works; Page 62 Getty Images: Time & Life Pictures; Page 64
Mary Evans Picture Library; Page 80 Bridgeman Art Library
Ltd: Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library; Page 90
Getty Images: Time & Life Pictures; Page 94 akg-images Ltd;
Page 111 Mary Evans Picture Library; Page 123 Bridgeman Art
Library Ltd: Private Collection / The Bridgeman Art Library;
Page 128 Photographers Direct; Page 137 Paul Shawcross;
Page 139 Corbis: Hulton Archive; Page 154 TopFoto: Topham
Picturepoint; Page 169 akg-images Ltd; Page 176 Corbis: James
Leynse; Page 225 Mary Evans Picture Library; Page 237 Alamy
Images: ICP; Page 250 Bridgeman Art Library Ltd: Guildhall
Library, City of London / The Bridgeman Art Library; Page 252
Getty Images: Hulton Archive; Page 255 Getty Images: Hulton
Archive; Page 275 Corbis: Bettmann; Page 284 TopFoto: Topham
Picturepoint; Page 288 Bridgeman Art Library Ltd: Louvre, Paris,
France / Giraudon / The Bridgeman Art Library; Page 295 Getty
Images: Popperfoto; Page 310 Getty Images: AFP; Page 311 Getty
Images: Huton Archive; Page 318 TopFoto: J White; Page 320
TopFoto: Image Works

All other images © Pearson Education

Picture Research by Alison Prior.

Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and we
apologise in advance for any unintentional omissions. We would
be pleased to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any sub-
sequent edition of this publication.

CHAPTER ONE

Historical awareness

This chapter looks at the difference between memory, whether
individual or collective, and the more disciplined approach towards
the past that characterizes an awareness of history. All groups have
a sense of the past, but they tend to use it to reinforce their own
beliefs and sense of identity. Like human memory, collective or
social memory can be faulty, distorted by factors such as a sense
of tradition or nostalgia, or else a belief in progress through time.
Modern professional historians take their cue from nineteenth-
century historicism, which taught that the past should be studied
on its own terms, ‘as it actually was’. However, this more detached
approach to the past can put historians in conflict with people who
feel their cherished versions of the past are under threat.

historical awareness’ is a slippery term. It can be regarded
JL Aas a universal psychological attribute, arising from the
fact that we are, all of us, in a sense historians. Because our
species depends more on experience than on instinct, life cannot
be lived without the consciousness of a personal past; and
someone who has lost it through illness or ageing is generally
regarded as disqualified from normal life. As individuals we draw
on our experience in all sorts of different ways - as a means of
affirming our identity, as a clue to our potential, as the basis for
our impression of others, and as some indication of the possibili-
ties that lie ahead. Our memories serve as both a data bank and
a means of making sense of an unfolding life story. We know
that we cannot understand a situation without some perception
of where it fits into a continuing process or whether it has hap-
pened before. The same holds true of our lives as social beings.

2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Third Reich

The technical term for
the National Socialist
(Nazi) regime in Germany,
1933-45. Reich (roughly
'Empire') was used to
denote the original
medieval German Empire
and the unified German
Empire (the Second
Reich), which lasted from
1871 to 1919.

All societies have a collective memory, a storehouse of experience
that is drawn on for a sense of identity and a sense of direction.
Professional historians commonly deplore the superficiality of
popular historical knowledge, but some knowledge of the past is
almost universal; without it one is effectively excluded from social
and political debate, just as loss of memory disqualifies one from
much everyday human interaction. Our political judgements are
permeated by a sense of the past, whether we are deciding between
the competing claims of political parties or assessing the feasibility
of particular policies. To understand our social arrangements, we
need to have some notion of where they have come from. In that
sense all societies possess ‘memory’.

But ‘historical awareness’ is not the same thing as social
memory. How the past is known and how it is applied to present
need are open to widely varying approaches. We know from per-
sonal experience that memory is neither fixed nor infallible: we
forget, we overlay early memories with later experience, we shift
the emphasis, we entertain false memories, and so on. In important
matters we are likely to seek confirmation of our memories from
an outside source. Collective memory is marked by the same dis-
tortions, as our current priorities lead us to highlight some aspects
of the past and to exclude others. In our political life especially,
memory is highly selective, and sometimes downright erroneous.
It is at this point that the term ‘historical awareness’ invites a more
rigorous interpretation. Under the Third Reich those Germans
who believed that all the disasters in German history were the fault
of the Jews certainly acknowledged the power of the past, but we
would surely question the extent of their historical awareness. In
other words, it is not enough to invoke the past; there must also be
a belief that getting the story right matters. History as a disciplined
enquiry aims to sustain the widest possible definition of memory,
and to make the process of recall as accurate as possible, so that
our knowledge of the past is not confined to what is immediately
relevant. The goal is a resource with open-ended application,
instead of a set of mirror-images of the present. That at least has
been the aspiration of historians for the past two centuries. Much
of this book will be devoted to evaluating how adequately histo-
rians achieve these ends. My purpose in this opening chapter is to
explore the different dimensions of social memory, and in so doing
to arrive at an understanding of what historians do and how it
differs from other sorts of thinking about the past.

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

3

I

Social memory: creating the self-identity of a
group

For any social grouping to have a collective identity there has
to be a shared interpretation of the events and experiences that
have formed the group over time. Sometimes this will include
an accepted belief about the origins of the group, as in the case
of many nation-states; or the emphasis may be on vivid turning
points and symbolic moments that confirm the self-image and
aspirations of the group. Current examples include the vital sig-
nificance of the Edwardian suffrage movement for the women’s
movement, and the appeal of the ‘molly house’ sub-culture of
eighteenth-century London for the gay community in Britain
today. 1 Without an awareness of a common past made up of such
human detail, men and women could not easily acknowledge the
claims on their loyalty of large abstractions.

The term ‘social memory’ accurately reflects the rationale of
popular knowledge about the past. Social groupings need a record
of prior experience, but they also require a picture of the past that
serves to explain or justify the present, often at the cost of histor-
ical accuracy. The operation of social memory is clearest in those
societies where no appeal can be made to the documentary record
as a corrective or higher authority. Pre-colonial Africa presents
some classic instances. 2 In literate societies the same was true for
those largely unlettered communities that lay outside the elite,
such as the peasantries of pre-modern Europe. What counted for
historical knowledge here was handed down as a narrative from
one generation to the next, often identified with particular places
and particular ceremonies or rituals. It provided a guide for
conduct and a set of symbols around which resistance to unwel-
come intrusion could be mobilized. Until quite recently popular
memory in a largely illiterate Sicily embraced both the Palermo
rising of 1282 against the Angevins (the ‘Sicilian Vespers’) and
the nineteenth-century Mafia as episodes in a national tradition
of avenging brotherhood. 3

But it would be a mistake to suppose that social memory is
the preserve of small-scale, pre-literate societies. In fact the term
itself highlights a universal need: if the individual cannot exist
without memory, neither can society, and that goes for large-scale

Edwardian suffrage
movement

The movement in the
period before the First
World War to obtain
the parliamentary vote
('suffrage') for women.

It is best known for
campaigns of the militant
suffragettes, although it
was the more moderate
suffragists who finally
obtained votes for women
in 1918.

molly house

An eighteenth-century
covert meeting house
for homosexual men.
Molly houses remained
little known until Mark
Ravenhill's play Mother
Clapp's Molly House
(2001 ) was staged to
widespread acclaim at the
Royal National Theatre in
London.

4

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

foundation myth

A story, usually much-
treasured, about the
foundation of a group or
people. One of the most
famous is the biblical
story of the Creation.
Nations often have semi-
'official' versions of their
origins, usually involving
national hero figures,
but foundation myths
can be found in schools,
army regiments and even
companies. 'Myth' need
not imply that the story
is entirely false, merely
that it has developed into
a simplistic, usually rosy,
version of events.

technologically advanced societies too. All societies look to their
collective memories for consolation or inspiration, and literate
societies are in principle no different. Near-universal literacy and
a high degree of residential mobility mean that the oral transmis-
sion of social memory is now much less important. But written
accounts (such as school history books or popular evocations of
the World Wars), film and television perform the same function.
Social memory continues to be an essential means of sustaining a
politically active identity. Its success is judged by how effectively
it contributes to collective cohesion and how widely it is shared
by members of the group. Sometimes social memory is based on
consensus and inclusion, and this is often the function of explic-
itly national narratives. It can take the form of a foundation
myth, as in the case of the far-seeing Founding Fathers of the
American Republic, whose memory is still invoked today in order
to shore up belief in the American nation. Alternatively, consen-
sual memory can focus on a moment of heroism, like the story of

Foundation myth: the Declaration of Independence by America's 'Founding Fathers' in 1776 remains an iconic
moment in American history of immense symbolic importance. American school history books still present it in
resolutely heroic terms. (Bridgeman Art Library/Capitol Collection, Washington, USA}

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

5

Dunkirk in 1940, which the British recall as the ingenious escape
that laid the foundations of victory (see Chapter 11 for fuller
discussion).

Social memory of past oppression

But social memory can also serve to sustain a sense of oppression,
exclusion or adversity, and these elements account for some of
the most powerful expressions of social memory. Social move-
ments entering the political arena for the first time are particularly
conscious of the absolute requirement of a past. Black history in
the United States has its origin in the kind of strategic concern
voiced by Malcolm X in the 1960s. One reason why blacks were
oppressed, he wrote, was that white America had cut them off
from their past:

If we don’t go into the past and find out how we got this way, we
will think that we were always this way. And if you think that you
were in the condition that you’re in right now, it’s impossible for
you to have too much confidence in yourself, you become worthless,
almost nothing . 4

The purpose of much British labour history has been to sharpen
the social awareness of the workers, to confirm their commit-
ment to political action, and to reassure them that history is ‘on
their side’ if only they will keep faith with the heroism of their
forebears. The historical reconstruction of working people’s expe-
rience was, as the inaugural editorial of History Workshop Journal
put it, ‘a source of inspiration and understanding’. 5 Working-class
memories of work, locality, family and politics - with all the pride
and anger so often expressed through them - were rescued before
they were pushed out of popular consciousness by an approved
national version.

The women’s movement of the past thirty years has been if
anything more conscious of the need for a usable past. For femi-
nists this requirement is not met by studies of exceptional women
such as Elizabeth I who operated successfully in a man’s world;
the emphasis falls instead on the economic and sexual exploita-
tion that has been the lot of most women, and on the efforts
of activists to secure redress. According to this perspective, the
critical determinant of women’s history was not nation or class,
but patriarchy: that is, the power of the household head over
his wife and children and, by extension, the power of men over

History Workshop

A collaborative research
venture set up by a group
of left-wing historians
led by Raphael Samuel
0934-96) at Ruskin
College, Oxford, to
encourage research and
debate in working-class
and women's history.

patriarchy

A social system based on
the dominance of fathers,
and, by extension, of men
in general.

e

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

women more generally. Because mainstream history suppresses
this truth, what it offers is not universal history but a blinkered
account of half the human race. These are the themes which, to
quote from the title of a popular feminist text, have been ‘hidden
from history ’. 6 As one American feminist has put it:

It is not surprising that most women feel that their sex does not have
an interesting or significant past. However, like minority groups,
women cannot afford to lack a consciousness of a collective identity,
one which necessarily involves a shared awareness of the past.
Without this, a social group suffers from a kind of collective amnesia,
which makes it vulnerable to the impositions of dubious stereotypes,
as well as limiting prejudices about what is right and proper for it to
do or not to do . 7

For socially deprived or ‘invisible’ groups - whether in a majority
such as workers and women, or in a minority such as blacks in
America and Britain - effective political mobilization depends on
a consciousness of common experience in the past.

II

Historicism - liberating the past from the present

But alongside these socially motivated views of the past has grown
up a form of historical awareness that starts from quite different
premises. While social memory has continued to open up inter-
pretations that satisfy new forms of political and social need, the
dominant approach in historical scholarship has been to value the
past for its own sake and, as far as possible, to rise above political
expediency. It was only during the nineteenth century that his-
torical awareness in this more rigorous sense became the defining
attribute of professional historians. There were certainly impor-
tant precursors - in the ancient world, in Islam, in dynastic China,
and in the West from the Renaissance onwards. But it was not
until the first half of the nineteenth century that all the elements of
historical awareness were brought together in a historical practice
that was widely recognized as the proper way to study the past.
This was the achievement of the intellectual movement known as
historicism , which began in Germany and soon spread all over the
Western world (the word comes from the German Historismus) .

The fundamental premise of the historicists was that the
autonomy of the past must be respected. They held that each age

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

7

is a unique manifestation of the human spirit, with its own culture
and values. For one age to understand another, there must be a
recognition that the passage of time has profoundly altered both
the conditions of life and the mentality of men and women - even
perhaps human nature itself. Historians are not the guardians of
universal values, nor can they deliver ‘the verdict of history’; they
must strive to understand each age in its own terms, to take on
its own values and priorities, instead of imposing ours. All the
resources of scholarship and all the historian’s powers of imagi-
nation must be harnessed to the task of bringing the past back
to life - or resurrecting it, to employ a favourite conceit of the
period. But historicism was more than an antiquarian rallying
cry. Its proponents maintained that the culture and institutions of
their own day could only be understood historically. Unless their
growth and development through successive ages were grasped,
their true nature would remain elusive. History, in short, held the
key to understanding the world.

Seeing through the eyes of the past

Historicism was one facet of Romanticism, the dominant move-
ment in European thought and art around 1800. The most
influential Romantic literary figure, Sir Walter Scott, aimed to
draw readers of his historical romances into the authentic atmos-
phere of the past. Popular interest in the surviving remains of the
past rose to new heights, and it extended to not only the ancient
world but also the hitherto despised Middle Ages. Historicism
represented the academic wing of the Romantic obsession with
the past. The leading figure in the movement was Leopold von
Ranke, a professor at Berlin University from 1824 until 1872 and
author of over sixty volumes. In the preface to his first book, he
wrote:

History has had assigned to it the task of judging the past, of
instructing the present for the benefit of the ages to come. To such
lofty functions this work does not aspire. Its aim is merely to show
how things actually were \wie es eigentlich gewesen]. s

By this Ranke meant more than an intention to reconstruct the
passage of events, though this was certainly part of his pro-
gramme. 9 What was new about the historicists’ approach was
their realization that the atmosphere and mentality of past ages
had to be reconstructed too, if the formal record of events was

8

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Thomas Carlyle
( 1795 - 1881 )

A popular, though
controversial, Victorian
writer and historian. He
was the author of a long,
colourful account of the
French Revolution.

empathy

The ability to enter into
the feelings of others
(not to be confused
with sympathy, which
denotes actually sharing
them). The term is
often used to describe a
historian's approach to
the 'foreignness' of past
societies. In the 1980s
there was an ultimately
ill-fated attempt to
assess children's ability to
empathize with people in
the past for examination
purposes.

French Revolution

The tumultuous political
events in late eighteenth-
century France which
overturned the monarchy
and established a republic
based upon the principles
of the Rights of Man.

It involved considerable
violence and chronic
political instability, until
Napoleon staged a military
coup in 1799.

Olympian

Detached and remote, like
the Creek gods on Mount
Olympus.

to have any meaning. The main task of the historian became
to find out why people acted as they did by stepping into their
shoes, by seeing the world through their eyes and as far as pos-
sible by judging it by their standards. Thomas Carlyle believed
more fervently in historical recreation than any other nineteenth-
century writer; whatever the purpose of historical work, ‘the
first indispensable condition’, he declared, was that ‘we see the
things transacted, picture them wholly, as if they stand before
our eyes ’. 10 And this obligation extended to all periods in the
past, however alien they might seem to modern observers. Ranke
himself strove to meet the historicist ideal in his treatment of the
wars of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Others
tackled the Middle Ages in the same spirit.

Ranke’s much-quoted preface is also important as a disclaimer
of relevance. Ranke did not maintain that historical research
served no purpose outside itself; indeed, he was probably the last
major historian to believe that the outcome of studies such as
his own would be to reveal the hand of God in human history.
But he did not look for practical lessons from the past. Indeed
he believed that detachment from present-day concerns was a
condition of understanding the past. His objection to previous
historians was not that they lacked all curiosity or empathy but
that they were diverted from the real task by the desire to preach,
or to give lessons in statecraft, or to shore up the reputation
of a ruling dynasty; in pursuing immediate goals they obscured
the true wisdom to be derived from historical study. In the
next chapter I will consider more fully the question of whether
relevance is necessarily incompatible with historical awareness.
But during the first half of the nineteenth century, when Europe
experienced a high degree of turbulence in the aftermath of the
French Revolution, history was politically contentious, and unless
a special virtue had been made of detachment, it is hard to see
how a scholarly historical practice could have become established.
Though very few people read Ranke today, his name continues to
stand for an Olympian impartiality and a duty to be true to the
past before all else.

The ‘otherness’ of the past

Historical awareness in the sense understood by the historicists
rests on three principles. The first, and most fundamental, is

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

9

difference-, that is, a recognition of the gulf that separates our
own age from all previous ages. Because nothing in history stands
still, the passage of time has profoundly altered the way we live.
The first responsibility of the historian is to take the measure
of the difference of the past; conversely one of the worst sins is
anachronism - the unthinking assumption that people in the past
behaved and thought as we do. This difference is partly about the
material conditions of life, a point sometimes forcibly made by
the surviving remains of the past such as buildings, implements
and clothing. Less obviously, but even more importantly, the
difference is one of mentality: earlier generations had different
values, priorities, fears and hopes from our own. We may take
the beauties of nature for granted, but medieval men and women
were terrified of forests and mountains and strayed from the
beaten track as little as possible. In late eighteenth-century rural
England, separation and remarriage were sometimes achieved by
means of a public wife-sale; although this was in part a reaction to
the virtual impossibility of legal divorce for the poor, it is hard for
the modern reader not to dwell on the extreme patriarchal values
implied in the humiliation of a wife led to market by her husband
and held by a halter. 11 During the same period public hangings
in London regularly drew crowds of 30,000 or more, both rich
and poor, and usually more women than men. Their motivation
varied: it might be to see justice done, to draw lessons from the
deportment of the condemned man or to register indignation at
his death; but all shared a readiness to gaze on an act of cold-
blooded cruelty from which most people today would recoil in
horror. 12 More recent periods may not be so strange, but we still
have to be alert to many evidences of difference. In mid-Victorian
England it was possible for a thoughtful educated person to
describe the teaming poor of East London as a ‘trembling mass of
maggots in a lump of carrion’. 13

Historical empathy, which has been much vaunted in class-
room practice in recent years, is often taken to mean a recognition
of the common humanity we share with our forebears; but a
more realistic (and also more rigorous) interpretation of empathy
dwells on the effort of imagination needed to penetrate past men-
talities, which are irremediably removed from anything in our
experience. As the novelist L.P. Hartley remarked, ‘The past is
a foreign country’. 14 Of course, like all foreign lands, the past is
never entirely alien. As well as the shock of revulsion, historians

anachronism

A historical inaccuracy in
which elements from one
historical period (usually
the present) are inserted
into an earlier one, such
as the use of modern
language or attitudes in
historical films and dramas.

carrion

The carcasses of dead
animals on which
scavengers feed.

L.P. Hartley
( 1895 - 1972 )

British novelist. His novel
The Go-Between, about
a young boy who carries
messages between a pair
of lovers, is told through
the memory of the boy
grown to adulthood. The
novel's opening line, 'The
past is a foreign country;
they do things differently
there' has been adopted
by historians trying to
put across the dangers
of imposing modern
assumptions on previous
ages.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

1 0

experience the shock of recognition - as when they come across
unaffected spontaneity in the behaviour of parents towards chil-
dren in seventeenth-century England, or uncover the consumerist
culture of eighteenth-century London. ‘All history’, it has been
said, ‘is a negotiation between familiarity and strangeness ’. 15 But
in any scholarly enquiry it is the otherness of the past that tends
to come to the fore because the passage of time has made exotic
what once seemed commonplace.

One of the ways in which we measure our distance from the
past is by periodization. Labelling by century has this effect, as
does the recognition of centenaries. More significant are the labels
devised by historians themselves, since these express a view about
the characteristics of the period concerned. As Ludmilla Jordanova
has observed, ‘marking time is the business of historians ’. 16 The
most vexed of these labels is ‘modern’. Until the nineteenth
century it was common to refer to all history since the fall of the
Roman Empire as ‘modern’. In universities ‘modern history’ is
still sometimes used in that generic sense (hence the subtitle of this
book). In most current contexts, however, ‘modern’ has a nar-
rower focus. It is identified with industrialization and the coming
of mass society (in consumption, politics and culture) during the
nineteenth century. The intervening epochs between the ancient
and modern worlds are divided up between the medieval and early
modern periods, with the fifteenth century usually treated as the
bridge between the two. These terms are indispensable to histo-
rians, but they are paradoxical. In one sense they signal historical
difference (we are not ‘early modern’); but they also impose on the
people of the past labels that had no meaning for them. In other
words, they represent an act of interpretation, devised with the
benefit of hindsight - and patently so when historians argue about
the merits of different versions. It should also be noted that these
labels are Eurocentric, and that they cannot easily be applied to
histories in other parts of the world . 17

Putting ‘otherness’ in context

Merely to register such instances of difference across the gulf
of time can give a salutary jolt to our modern assumptions. But
historians aim to go much further than this. Their purpose is
not only to uncover the strangeness of the past but to explain
it, and that means placing it in its historical setting. What may

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

1 1

seem bizarre or disturbing to us becomes explicable - though not
necessarily less shocking - when interpreted as a manifestation
of a particular society. To recoil in horror from the grisly details
of witchcraft accusations in early modern Europe is certainly to
acknowledge the gulf that separates that time from ours, but this
is no more than a point of departure. The reason why we under-
stand this phenomenon so much better now than we did thirty
years ago is that historians have positioned it in relation to beliefs
about the human body, the framework of popular religious belief
outside the Church, and the tensions in the position of women . 18
Context is thus the second component of historical awareness.
The underlying principle of all historical work is that the subject
of our enquiry must not be wrenched from its setting. Just as we
would not pronounce on the significance of an archaeological
find without first recording carefully its precise location in the
site, so we must place everything we know about the past in its
contemporary context. This is an exacting standard, requiring a
formidable breadth of knowledge. It is often what distinguishes
the professional from the amateur. The enthusiast working on
family history in the local record office can, with a little technical
guidance, substantiate a sequence of births, marriages and deaths,
often extending over many generations; the amateur will come
to grief not over factual omissions but because of an inadequate
grasp of the relevant economic or social settings. To the social
historian, the history of the family is not fundamentally about
lines of descent, or even about plotting average family size down
the ages; it is about placing the family within the shifting contexts
of household production, health, religion, education and state
policy . 19 Everything in the historian’s training militates against
presenting the past as a fixed single-track sequence of events;
context must be respected at every point.

The historical continuum

But history is more than a collection of snapshots of the past,
however vivid and richly contextualized. A third fundamental
aspect of historical awareness is the recognition of historical
process - the relationship between events over time which endows
them with more significance than if they were viewed in isolation.
For example, historians continue to be interested in the applica-
tion of steam power to cotton spinning in the late eighteenth

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

1 2

Scramble for Africa

The term given to the
process by which, in
the 1880s and 1890s,
almost the entire African
continent was taken over
by European powers. The
term, which was used at
the time, reflects distaste
at the naked greed with
which the Europeans
jostled with each other
to grab vast areas of land
with no thought at all for
the welfare of the African
peoples who lived there.

kinship systems

Social systems based upon
the extended family.

venerable

Worthy of respect and
reverence, especially by
virtue of age and wisdom.

century, not so much because it is a striking instance of technical
and entrepreneurial ingenuity but because it contributed so much
to what has come to be called the Industrial Revolution. Specific
annexations during the Scramble for Africa attract attention
because they formed part of a large-scale imperialism by the
European powers; and so on. Apart from their intrinsic interest,
what lies behind our concern with these instances of historical
process is the much bigger question of how we got from ‘then’
to ‘now’. This is the ‘big story’ to which so many more restricted
enquiries contribute. There may be a gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’,
but that gulf is actually composed of processes of growth, decay
and change which it is the business of historians to uncover.
Thus the fuller understanding we now have of witchcraft in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries begs the question of how this
form of belief came into decline and disrepute, to the point where
in Western society today it is subscribed to by only a very few self-
conscious revivalists. Historical processes have sometimes been
marked by abrupt transitions when history, as it were, speeded
up - as in the case of the great revolutions. At the other extreme,
history may almost stand still, its flow only perceptible with the
hindsight of many centuries, as in patterns of land use or kinship
systems in many pre-industrial societies . 20

If historical awareness rests on the notion of continuum, this
cuts both ways: just as nothing has remained the same in the
past, so too our world is the product of history. Every aspect of
our culture, behaviour and beliefs is the outcome of processes
over time. This is true not only of venerable institutions such
as the Christian Churches or the British monarchy, which are
visibly the outcome of centuries of evolution; it applies also to the
most familiar aspects of every day, such as marriage or personal
hygiene, which are much less often placed in a historical frame.
No human practice ever stands still; all demand a historical per-
spective which uncovers the dynamics of change over time. This is
one reason why it is so important that students should study large
swathes of history. At present in British schools and universities
there is so much emphasis on the virtues of documentary study
and narrow specialism that major historical trends tend to dis-
appear from view.

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

III

Are professional historical awareness and popular
social memory in opposition?

In the sense understood by the historicists, then, historical aware-
ness means respecting the autonomy of the past, and attempting
to reconstruct it in all its strangeness before applying its insights
to the present. The effect of this programme was to drive a bigger
wedge between elite and popular attitudes to the past, which
has persisted until today. Professional historians insist on a
lengthy immersion in the primary sources, a deliberate shedding
of present-day assumptions, and a rare degree of empathy and
imagination. Popular historical knowledge, on the other hand,
tends to a highly selective interest in the remains of the past, is
shot through with present-day assumptions, and is only inciden-
tally concerned to understand the past on its own terms. Three
recurrent features of social memory have particularly significant
distorting effects.

The distorting effects of tradition

The first of these is respect for tradition. In many areas of life -
from the law courts to political associations, from churches to
sports clubs - belief and behaviour are governed by the weight
of precedent: an assumption that what was done in the past is
an authoritative guide to what should be done in the present.
Respect for tradition is sometimes confused with a sense of
history because it involves an affection for the past (or some of it)
and a desire to keep faith with it. But there is very little of the his-
torical about appeals to tradition. Following the path laid down
by the ancestors has a great deal to be said for it in communities
that neither experience change nor expect it; for them present
and past can scarcely be distinguished. That is why respect for
tradition contributed so much to the cohesion of society among
small-scale pre-literate peoples - and why indeed they are some-
times referred to by anthropologists as ‘traditional societies’. But
such conditions no longer exist. In any society with a dynamic of
social or cultural change, as indicated by external trade or social
hierarchy or political institutions, an uncritical respect for tradi-
tion is counterproductive. It suppresses the historical changes
that have occurred in the intervening period; indeed it positively

autonomous

State of self-governing
independence.

1 4

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

The State Opening of
Parliament. Much of
the ritual at this annual
ceremony has strong
historical resonance,
but this should not
be confused with a
professional, analytical
sense of history. Such
traditions can, in fact,
conjure up the past to
obscure the political reality
of the present.

(Getty Images/AFP)

discourages any attention to those changes and leads to the
continuance of outward forms that are really redundant - or
which we might say have been ‘overtaken by history’. One reason
for the famed stability of parliamentary government in Britain is
that Parliament itself enjoys the prestige of a 700-year-old history
as ‘the mother of parliaments’. This confers considerable legiti-
macy: one often hears it said that Parliament has stood the test
of time, that it has been the upholder of constitutional liberties,
and so on. But it also results in a reluctance to consider honestly
how Parliament actually functions. The ability of the House of
Commons to restrain the executive has declined sharply since
the Second World War, but so far the immense tradition-based
prestige of Parliament has blunted the demand for fundamental
reform. Such is the authority of tradition that ruling groups have
at various times invented it in order to bolster their prestige.
Almost all the ‘traditional’ ceremonial associated with the royal
family was improvised during the reign of Victoria, yet this
rooting in specific historical circumstances is just what the whole
notion of ‘tradition’ denies. 21 In modern societies tradition may
hold a sentimental appeal, but to treat it as a guide to life tends
to lead to unfortunate results.

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

1 5

The invented traditions of nationalism

The consequences of respect for tradition are particularly disturbing
in the case of nationalism. Nations are of course the product of
history, and the same national designation has usually meant dif-
ferent things at different times. Unfortunately historians have not
always kept this truth at the forefront of their minds. For all their
scholarly principle, the nineteenth-century historicists found it hard
to resist the demand for one-dimensional, nation-building history,
and many did not even try. Europe was then the scene of bitterly
contested national identities, as existing national boundaries were
challenged by those many peoples whose sense of nationhood
was denied - from the Germans and Italians to the Poles and
Hungarians. Their claim to nationhood rested partly on language
and common culture. But it also required a historical rationale,
of past glories to be revived, or ancient wrongs to be avenged - in
short, a tradition that could sustain the morale of the nation in the
present and impress the other powers of Europe. Historians were
caught up in popular nationalism like everyone else, and many
saw no contradiction between the tenets of their profession and
the writing of self-serving national histories. Frantisek Palacky
was both a historian and a Czech nationalist. He combined his two
great passions in a sequence of books that portrayed the Czechs as a
freedom-loving and democratic people since the dawn of historical
time; when he died in 1876 he was mourned as the father of the
Czech nation. 22 Celebratory histories of this kind lend themselves
to regular rituals of commemoration, when the national self-image
could be reinforced in the popular mind. Every year the Serbs mark
the anniversary of their epic defeat at the hands of the Turks on
the field of Kosovo Polje in 1389, and in so doing reaffirm their
identity as a brave but beleaguered people; they continued to do so
throughout the crisis in former Yugoslavia. 23 In such instances the
untidy reality of history is beside the point. Nation, race and culture
are brought together as a unified constant. Other examples span the
modern world from the Nazis in Germany to the ideology of black
separatism in the United States. Essentialism or ‘immemorialism’
of this kind produces a powerful sense of exclusive identity, but it
makes bad history. Not only is everything in the past that contra-
dicts the required self-image suppressed; the interval between ‘then’
and ‘now’ is telescoped by the assertion of an unchanging identity,
impervious to the play of historical circumstance.

essentialism

Relating to the basic
nature (the 'essence') of
people or nations.

rhetoric

Originally the ancient
Creek art of public
speaking, but more usually
used nowadays to mean
points that rely on the
persuasive power of words
or voice rather than actual
argument.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

The process of tradition-making is particularly clear in newly
autonomous nations, where the need for a legitimizing past is
strongly felt and the materials for a national past are often in
short supply. Within two generations of the War of Independence,
Americans had come to identify with a flattering self-image: in
taming the wilderness far away from the corruptions of the old
society in Europe, their colonial forebears had developed the
values of self-reliance, honesty and liberty that were now the her-
itage of all Americans: hence the enduring appeal of folk heroes
such as Daniel Boone. More recently many African countries have
faced the problem that their boundaries are the artificial outcome
of the European partition of the continent in the late nineteenth
century. In a few cases, such as Mali and Zimbabwe, descent can
be claimed from a much earlier state of the same name. Ghana
adopted the name of a medieval trading empire which did not
include its present territory at all. Elsewhere in the continent
political leaders have invoked timeless qualities from the pre-
colonial past (like Julius Nyerere’s ujamaa, or brotherhood) as a
charter of identity. To forge a national identity without some such
legitimizing past is probably impossible.

But appeals to an unchanging past are not confined to new
or repressed nations. Nineteenth-century Britain had a relatively
secure sense of nationhood, yet in the work of historians at that
time is to be found an unchanging national essence as well as the
idea of change over time. William Stubbs, usually regarded as the
first professional historian in Britain, believed that the reasons
for the growth of the English constitution through the Middle
Ages lay ‘deep in the very nature of the people’; in this reading
parliamentary government became the expression of a national
genius for freedom. 24 Essentialist categories come readily to the
lips of politicians, particularly at moments of crisis. During the
Second World War Winston Churchill invoked a tradition of
dogged resistance to foreign attack stretching back to Pitt the
Younger and Elizabeth I. Liberal commentators were uncomfort-
ably reminded of this vein of rhetoric at the time of the Falklands
War in 1982. Pondering the lessons of the conflict, Margaret
Thatcher declared:

This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in
courage, and in resolution. We have not changed. When the demands of
war and the dangers to our own people call us to arms - then we British
are as we have always been - competent, courageous and resolute . 25

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

1 7

Nationalism of this kind rests on the assertion of tradition, rather
than an interpretation of history. It suppresses difference and
change in order to uphold identity.

IV

Nostalgia - history as loss

Traditionalism is the crudest distortion of historical awareness,
because it does away with the central notion of development over
time. Other distortions are more subtle. One that has huge influ-
ence is nostalgia. Like tradition, nostalgia is backward-looking,
but instead of denying the fact of historical change, it interprets it
in one direction only - as change for the worse. Nostalgia is most
familiar perhaps as generational regret: older people habitually
complain that nowadays the young are unruly, or that the country
is ‘going to the dogs’, and the same complaints have been docu-
mented over a very long period . 26 But nostalgia works on a broader
canvas too. It works most strongly as a reaction to a sense of loss
in the recent past, and it is therefore particularly characteristic of
societies undergoing rapid change. Anticipation and optimism are
never the only - or even the main - social responses to progress.
There is nearly always regret or alarm at the passing of old ways
and familiar landmarks. A yearning backward glance offers con-
solation, an escape in the mind from a harsh reality. It is when the
past appears to be slipping away before our eyes that we seek to
re-create it in the imagination. This was one of the mainsprings of
the Romantic movement, and within historicism itself there was
a sometimes unduly nostalgic impulse, as scholars reacted against
the industrialization and urbanization around them. It is no
accident that the Middle Ages, with its close-knit communities and
its slow pace of change, came into fashion just as the gathering
pace of economic change was enlarging the scale of social life. Ever
since the Industrial Revolution, nostalgia has continued to be one
of the emotional reflexes of societies experiencing major change.
One of its commonest expressions in Britain today is ‘heritage’.
When the past is conserved or re-enacted for our entertainment, it
is usually (though not invariably) presented in its most attractive
light. Bygone splendours, such as the medieval tournament or the
Elizabethan banquet, naturally lend themselves to the pleasures of
spectacle; but everyday life - such as the back-breaking routines

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

1 8

myopia

Short-sightedness.

The image of the dome
of St Paul's Cathedral
standing intact through
the devastating London
Blitz of 1 940 became a
powerful symbol both
of British defiance of
Nazi Germany and of a
particular approach to the
distinctiveness of British
history. More recent
scholarship questions the
extent to which the British
people were united in
the Blitz, but the popular
social 'memory' of the
'Blitz spirit' shows no sign
of diminishing.

(Getty Images/Hulton
Archive)

of the early industrial craft shop or the Victorian kitchen - is also
dressed up in order to be visually appealing. A sense of loss is part
of the experience of visiting heritage sites.

The problem with nostalgia is that it is a very lopsided view
of history. If the past is redesigned as a comfortable refuge, all its
negative features must be removed. The past becomes better and
simpler than the present. Thus nineteenth-century medievalism
took little account of the brevity and squalor of life or the power
of a malign spirit-world. Present-day nostalgia shows a compa-
rable myopia. Even a simulation of the London Blitz will prompt
regret at the loss of ‘wartime spirit’ as much as horror at the
effects of aerial bombardment. Champions of ‘family values’ who
posit a golden age in the past (before 1939 or 1914, according
to taste) overlook the large number of loveless marriages before
divorce was made easier, and the high incidence of family break-
up through the loss of a spouse or parent from natural causes. In
such cases, as Raphael Samuel put it, the past functions less as
history than as allegory:

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

1 9

It is a testimony to the decline in manners and morals, a mirror
to our failings, a measure of absence ... By a process of selective
amnesia the past becomes a historical equivalent of the dream of
primal bliss, or of the enchanted space which memory accords to
childhood . 27

This kind of outlook is not only an unreliable guide to the
past but also a basis for pessimism and rigidity in the present.
Nostalgia presents the past as an alternative to the present instead
of as a prelude to it. It encourages us to hanker after an unattain-
able golden age instead of engaging creatively with the world as it
is. Whereas historical awareness should enhance our insight into
the present, nostalgia indulges a desire to escape from it.

V

Dismissing the past: history as progress

At the other end of the scale of historical distortion lies the
belief in progress. If nostalgia reflects a pessimistic view of the
world, progress is an optimistic creed, for it asserts not only that
change in the past has been for the better but that improvement
will continue into the future. Like process, progress is about
change over time, but with the crucial difference that a positive
value is placed on the change, endowing it with moral content.
The concept of progress is fundamental to modernity, because
for 200 years it was the defining myth of the West, a source of
cultural self-assurance and of outright superiority in the West’s
dealings with the rest of the world. In this sense progress was
essentially the invention of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth
century. Hitherto a limit on human development had always been
assumed, either on account of the mysterious workings of Divine
Providence or because the achievements of classical antiquity
were regarded as unsurpassable. The Enlightenment of the eight-
eenth century placed its faith in the power of human reason to
transform the world. Writers such as Voltaire, Hume and Adam
Smith regarded history as an unfinished record of material and
moral improvement. They sought to reveal the shape of history
by tracing the growth of human society from primitive barbarism
to civilization and refinement. The confidence of these historians
may seem naive and grandiose today, but for 200 years some such
structure has underpinned all varieties of progressive thought,

20

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

J.H. Plumb (1911-2001)

Sir John H. Plumb,
a leading Cambridge
historian specializing in
the history of eighteenth-
century Britain. Plumb was
an influential figure, many
of whose students went
on to become high-profile
historians.

including both liberal democracy and Marxism. As recently as the
1960s representatives of these two traditions - J.H. Plumb and
E.H. Carr - wrote widely read manifestos for history informed
by a passionate belief in progress. 28 That kind of faith is much
rarer today, in the light of dire predictions of environmental and
economic disaster. But few of us are happy to live in a world of
nostalgic regret all the time; the yearning for a lost golden age in
one sphere is often balanced by the confident disparagement of
‘the bad old days’ in another.

That dismissal of the past points to the limitations of progress
as a view of history. Whereas ‘process’ is a neutral term without
an implicit value judgment, ‘progress’ is by definition evaluative
and partial; since it is premised on the superiority of the present
over the past, it inevitably takes on whatever values happen to
be prevalent today, with the consequence that the past seems
less admirable and more ‘primitive’ the further back in time we
go. Condescension and incomprehension are the result. If the
past exists strictly to validate the achievements of the present,
there can be no room for an appreciation of its cultural riches.
Proponents of progress have never been good at understanding
periods remote from their own age. Voltaire, for example, was
notoriously unable to recognize any good in the Middle Ages;
his historical writings traced the growth of rationality and tol-
erance and condemned the rest. So if the desire to demonstrate
progress is pressed too far, it quickly comes into conflict with the
historian’s obligation to re-create the past on its own terms. In
fact historicism took shape very much as a reaction against the
present-minded devaluation of the past that characterized many
writers of the Enlightenment. Ranke regarded every age as being
‘next to God’, by which he meant that it should not be prejudged
by modern standards. Interpreting history as an overarching story
of progress involves doing just that.

Tradition, nostalgia and progress provide the basic constitu-
ents of social memory. Each answers a deep psychological need
for security - through seeming to promise no change, or change
for the better, or an escape into a more congenial past. The real
objection to them is that, as a governing stance, they require the
past to conform with a deeply felt and often unacknowledged
need. They are about belief, not enquiry. They look for a con-
sistent window on the past, and they end up doing scant justice
to anything else.

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

2 1

VI

Challenging the conventional version

If social need so easily leads to distorted images of the past, it
is hardly surprising that historians have on the whole kept their
distance from it. At a practical level the stance of the professional
historian towards social memory is not always consistent. Thus
Herbert Butterfield, who made his name in the 1930s with an
attack on present-minded history, wrote an impassioned evoca-
tion of the English historical tradition in 1944 which was clearly
intended to contribute to wartime morale. 29 Today the news-
papers quite often publish articles by leading historians who are
tempted by the opportunity to influence popular attitudes towards
the past. But the profession as a whole prefers to emphasize how
different the purpose and approach of scholarly historical work
are. Whereas the starting point for most popular forms of knowl-
edge about the past is the requirements of the present, the starting
point of historicism is the aspiration to re-enter or re-create the
past.

It follows that one important task of historians is to challenge
socially motivated misrepresentations of the past. This activity
has been likened to ‘the eye-surgeon, specializing in removing
cataracts’. 30 But whereas patients are only too glad to have their
sight corrected, society may be deeply attached to its faulty vision
of the past, and historians do not make themselves popular in
pointing this out. Many of their findings incur the odium of
undermining hallowed pieties - as in the case of historians who
question the efficacy of Churchill’s wartime leadership, or who
attempt a nonsectarian approach to the history of Northern
Ireland. There is probably no official nationalist history in the
world that is proof against the deflating effect of academic
enquiry. The same is true of the kind of engaged history that
underwrites the conflict between Left and Right. Politically moti-
vated labour history in Britain has tended to emphasize political
radicalism and the struggle against capital; yet if it is to provide
a realistic historical perspective in which political strategies can
be planned, labour history cannot afford to ignore the equally
long tradition of working-class Toryism, still very much alive
today. When Peter Burke told a conference of socialist historians,
‘although I consider myself a socialist and a historian, I’m not
a socialist historian’, he meant that he wanted to study the real

Herbert Butterfield
( 1900 - 79 )

Cambridge historian
specializing in the
eighteenth century.

His analysis of The
Whig Interpretation of
History (1931) attacked
the tendency of 'Whig'
historians to see history
in terms of progress,
thereby unjustly (and
anachronistically)
criticizing earlier ages as
'backward'.

nonsectarian

Avoiding allegiance to any
particular religious group.

2 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

untrammelled

Unhindered.

rolling back of the state

The role of the state
grew enormously in
twentieth-century Britain,
especially after Clement
Attlee's postwar Labour
government (1945-513
nationalized heavy
industry and the health
service. The Conservative
governments of Margaret
Thatcher (1979-90)
reversed this policy by
returning nationalized
industry to private
ownership.

complexity of the historical record, not reduce it to an overdrama-
tized confrontation between Us and Them. 31 The same argument
can be made with regard to distortion emanating from the Right.
During the mid-1980s Margaret Thatcher tried to make political
capital out of a somewhat self-serving image of nineteenth-
century England. When she applauded ‘Victorian values’, she
meant that untrammelled individualism and a rolling back of the
state might once again make Britain great. She omitted to say that
the essential precondition of the Victorian economic miracle had
been Britain’s global strategic dominance, and she did not dwell
on the appalling social costs in terms of destitution and environ-
mental damage. Historians were quick to point out that her vision
was both unrealistic and undesirable. 32

The overlap between history and social memory

If this debunking activity would seem to put historians in the
opposite camp from the keepers of social memory, it needs to be
stressed that the distinction is by no means as hard and fast as
I have depicted it up to this point. One strand of opinion (par-
ticularly associated with Postmodernism) holds that there is in
fact no difference between history and social memory. According
to this view, the aspiration to re-create the past is an illusion,
and all historical writing bears the indelible impression of the
present - indeed tells us more about the present than the past.
I will evaluate the merits of this radically subversive position in
Chapter 7. Here it is enough to point out that the collapsing of
history into social memory appeals to a particular kind of scep-
tical theorist but commands very little support from historians.
However, there are significant areas of overlap. It would be wrong
to suppose that accuracy of research is the exclusive property of
professional historians. As Raphael Samuel pointed out, there is
an army of enthusiastic amateurs in this country, investigating
everything from family genealogy to steam locomotives, whose
fetish for accuracy is unsurpassed. 33 Academic historians may dis-
tance themselves from the distortions of social memory, but many
well-established historical specialisms today have their origin in
an explicit political need: one thinks of labour history, women’s
history and African history. It is not always possible to distin-
guish completely between history and social memory, because
historians perform some of the tasks of social memory. Perhaps

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

2 3

most important of all, social memory itself is an important topic
of historical enquiry. It is central to popular consciousness in all
its forms, from democratic politics to social mores and cultural
taste, and no comprehensive social history can afford to ignore
it; oral history represents in part an attempt to take account of
this dimension (see below, Chapter 11). In all these ways history
and social memory feed on each other. As Geoffrey Cubitt puts
it, ‘History and memory are proximate concepts: they inhabit a
similar mental territory’. 34

Yet for all these points of convergence, the distinction that
historians like to make between their work and social memory
remains important. Whether social memory services a totalitarian
regime or the needs of interest groups within a democratic society,
its value and its prospects of survival are entirely dependent on
its functional effectiveness: the content of the memory will change
according to context and priorities. Of course historical scholar-
ship is not immune from calculations of practical utility. Partly
this is because we understand more clearly than Ranke did that
historians cannot detach themselves completely from their own
time. Partly also, as I will argue in the next chapter, the richness
of history is positively enhanced by responding to topical agendas.
Where most historians will usually part company from the
keepers of social memory is in insisting that their findings should
be guided by the historicist principles described in this chapter -
that historical awareness should prevail over social need. This is
a principle that can be defended on its own merits. But it must
also be sustained if we are to have any prospect of learning from
history, as distinct from finding there the mirror-image of our
own immediate concerns. To that possibility I now turn.

Myths of popular history

When the Germans invaded France in May 1940 the British
Expeditionary Force was forced to retreat to the port of
Dunkerque (Dunkirk), from where it had to be evacuated under
heavy fire. Many in Britain mistakenly perceived the operation
as a success, and the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ came to denote cheery
optimism and resolution in the face of overwhelming odds.

On Easter Tuesday 1282 the people of Palermo rose up
against the French, massacring as many as they could find while
they were at vespers (evening prayer). The ‘Sicilian Vespers’

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

24

became a symbol of the immense potential power of a popular
uprising to strike without warning and to oust a foreign
occupying force, and therefore had resonance far beyond its
immediate historical context. The Mafia also has its origins in
medieval Sicily, where it was one of a number of clandestine
brotherhoods operating a pseudo-feudal system outside the law.
Mafia ‘barons’ ruled their neighbourhoods, often combining
benevolence with ruthless enforcement of their authority.

Elements of the Mafia were caught up in large-scale Italian
emigration to the United States in the late nineteenth century,
where they moved into protection rackets and organized crime.
The Italian-American Mafia rose to public prominence through
its involvement in supplying illegal alcohol during the years of
Prohibition (1919-33), becoming part of American mythology in
the process.

In 1776 representatives of the thirteen British colonies in
North America, including John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and
Benjamin Franklin, met in Philadelphia and signed the Declaration
of Independence, renouncing British rule and founding the United
States. Nowadays they are popularly revered and romanticized
in America as the ‘Founding Fathers’. It remains rare - indeed, it
is considered almost unpatriotic - for Americans to subject the
Founding Fathers to serious critical historical evaluation.

Malcolm X (1925-65), a leading figure in the radical black
civil rights movement in the United States in the 1960s, called for
a major reappraisal of the mythology of American history and of
the role Africans played in it.

Periods of history

It is easy to forget that historical periods are later constructs;
no one at the time knew they were living in ‘the ancient world’
or ‘the Middle Ages’. These terms also reflect the values and
judgements of those who coined them. The term ‘Middle Ages’
was coined by scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth-century
Renaissance to refer to what they saw as a long period of
ignorance and superstition which interposed between the ‘golden
age’ of the ancients and their own day. Periods are often defined
in terms of centuries or decades - ‘the eighteenth century’, ‘the
Sixties’ - or else in terms of rulers, as in ‘Tudor England’ or
‘the Victorians’, though this can be unsatisfactory: ‘Victorian’
attitudes can be traced up to the First World War; the reign of the
first Tudor monarch, Henry VII, was not significantly different
from that of his Yorkist predecessors; and the features most

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

2 5

commonly associated with the youth culture of the Sixties can be
more accurately dated from c.1965 to c.1975. Historians often
deliberately ignore conventional periodization: Frank O’Gorman
has written of the ‘long eighteenth century’, from the ‘Glorious’
Revolution of 1688 to the Reform Act of 1832, while Eric
Hobsbawm has written of a ‘short twentieth century’, beginning
with the First World War and ending with the fall of European
communism in 1989-91.

Enlightenment and the Romantics

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century grew out of the
scientific revolution of the previous century, which had stressed
the importance of learning through observation and deduction
rather than by the unquestioning acceptance of past authority.
Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau
applied these ideas to human society, teaching that humans’
‘natural’ condition is to be free, and that human behaviour should
be governed by reason rather than by irrational and ‘unnatural’
tradition or religious faith. Enlightenment philosophy was an
important influence on the leaders of the French Revolution.

Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement in the
early nineteenth century, heavily influenced by the ideas of the
French Revolution. It sought to give free range to the emotions,
and thereby to attain eternal truths. The Romantics found
inspiration in the romances and tales of the Middle Ages, for
example the tales of King Arthur.

Nationalism, also originating in the French Revolution,
emphasized the importance of a sense of collective national
identity. Much of nationalism is concerned with preserving and
cherishing ‘traditional’ national language and culture, but it is also
closely identified with the idea of the nation-state, in which states
are organized along national ethnic lines.

Further reading

Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography, Routledge, 1999.

Beverley Southgate, History: What and Why?, 2nd edn, Routledge,
2004.

J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, Macmillan, 1969.

2 e

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

George G. Iggers & James Powell (eds), Leopold Ranke and the
Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse University Press,

1990.

Geoffey Cubitt, History and Memory, Manchester University Press,
2007.

Stefan Berger (ed.), Writing National Histories, Routledge, 1998.

David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge University
Press, 1985.

David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spirit of History,
Viking, 1997.

Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. I: Past and Present in
Contemporary Culture, Verso, 1994.

Sam Wineberg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts:

Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, Temple University Press,

2001.

Notes

1 Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House: the Gay Subculture in
England, 1700-1830, Gay Men’s Press, 1992.

2 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, James Currey, 1985.

3 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, Blackwell, 1992,
ch. 5.

4 Malcolm X, On Afro-American History, 3rd edn, Pathfinder, 1990,

p. 12.

5 History Workshop Journal, I, 1976, p. 2 (editorial).

6 Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History, Pluto Press, 1973.

7 Sheila R. Johansson, ‘“Herstory” as history: a new field or another
fad?’, in Berenice A. Carroll (ed.), Liberating Women’s History,
Illinois University Press, 1976, p. 427.

8 L. von Ranke, Histories of the Latin and German Nations from 1494
to 1514, extract translated in G.P. Gooch, History and Historians in
the Nineteenth Century, 2nd edn, Longman, 1952, p. 74.

9 Unfortunately this is the impression conveyed by the most frequently
cited translation, ‘what actually happened’: see Fritz Stern (ed.), The
Varieties of History, 2nd edn, Macmillan, 1970, p. 57.

10 Thomas Carlyle, quoted in J.R. Hale (ed.), The Evolution of British
Historiography, Macmillan, 1967, p. 42.

11 E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, Penguin, 1993, ch. 7.

HISTORICAL AWARENESS

27

12 V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People,
1770-1868, Oxford University Press, 1994.

13 Quoted in Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, Penguin, 1976,
p. 258.

14 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, Penguin, 1958, p. 7.

15 Simon Schama, ‘Clio at the Multiplex’, The New Yorker, 19 January
1998, p. 40.

16 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Marking time’, in Holger Hoock (ed. ), History,
Commemoration and National Preoccupation, Oxford University
Press, 2007, p. 7.

17 Penelope J. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History, Yale University
Press, 2007, pp. 131-49.

18 See, for example, James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness:

Witchcraft in England, 1550-1750, Hamish Hamilton, 1996;
Jonathan Barry, Marianne Helster and Gareth Roberts (eds),
Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press,
1996.

19 See, for example, John Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British
Marriages, 1600 to the Present, Oxford University Press, 1985.

20 Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the social sciences: la longue duree\ in
his On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, pp. 25-52.

21 E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition,
Cambridge University Press, 1982.

22 Richard G. Plaschka, ‘The political significance of Frantisek Palacky’,
Journal of Contemporary History, VIII, 1973, pp. 35-55.

23 Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, Macmillan, 1998.

24 William Stubbs, quoted in Christopher Parker, The English Historical
Tradition since 1850, Donald, 1990, pp. 42-3.

25 Margaret Thatcher, speech in Cheltenham, 3 July 1982, reprinted in
Anthony Barnett, Iron Britannia, Allison & Busby, 1982.

26 Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears,
Macmillan, 1983.

27 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. II: Island Stories:
Unravelling Britain, Verso, 1998, pp. 337-8.

28 J.H. Plumb, The Death of the Past, Macmillan, 1969; E.H. Carr,
What Is History ? Macmillan, 1961.

29 H. Butterfield, The Englishman and His History, Cambridge
University Press, 1944.

30 Theodore Zeldin, ‘After Braudel’, The Listener, 5 November 1981,
p. 542.

31 Peter Burke, ‘People’s history or total history’, in Raphael Samuel

28

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

(ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1981, p. 8.

32 Eric M. Sigsworth (ed.), In Search of Victorian Values, Manchester
University Press, 1988; T.C. Smout (ed.), Victorian Values, British
Academy, 1992.

33 Raphael Samuel, ‘Unofficial knowledge’, in his Theatres of Memory,
vol. I: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, Verso, 1994,

pp. 3-39.

34 Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory, Manchester University Press,
2007, p. 4.

CHAPTER TWO

The uses of history

This chapter looks at some of the different ways in which
historians have tried to explain the purpose of their work. Some
see history as a study in itself which needs no wider justification;
others see it in terms of the inexorable march across time of great
forces, human or even divine, which explain both how we got to
where we are and where we might be heading; others deny that
history has any lessons for us at all. Historians explain the past
in response to present-day concerns and questions. History can
certainly allow us to experience situations and face alternatives
that we would not otherwise encounter, and in that sense it serves
a useful purpose; it can also reveal that aspects of modern life are
not as old, or as new, as we have assumed. But how can we learn
any useful lessons from history - especially for the future - when
so much depends on the details of the historical context? And if
history does not repeat itself, what sort of a guide can it provide
for the present?

N one of the issues discussed in this book has drawn a greater
variety of answers than the question ‘What can we learn
from history?’ The answers have ranged from Henry Ford’s cel-
ebrated aphorism ‘history is bunk’ to the belief that history holds
the clue to human destiny. The fact that historians themselves
give very different responses suggests that this is an open-ended
question which cannot be reduced to a tidy solution. But anyone
proposing to spend several years - and in some cases a lifetime -
studying the subject must reflect on what purpose it serves. And
one cannot get very far in understanding how historians set about
their work, or in evaluating its outcome, without first considering
the rationale of historical enquiry.

30

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

trajectory

The line of an object in
flight. It can be applied, as
here, to a perceived 'path'
of a theme traced over a
long period of time.

Divine Providence

The idea of a benevolent
Cod who watches over and
protects people on earth.

Last Judgement

In Christian, especially
Catholic, theology the Last
Judgement is the moment
at the end of time when
all humans come before
Cod for judgement on
their lives on earth, some
being allowed to enter
heaven, others being
condemned for eternity
to hell. It was a common
theme in medieval art and
is dramatically presented
in Michelangelo's frescos
in the Sistine Chapel in the
Vatican.

Enlightenment belief in
moral progress

The eighteenth-century
Enlightenment believed
that the exercise of human
reason would liberate
people from the mental
and political oppression
of organized religion and
superstition. By aiming
for greater human liberty
and happiness, reason
was thereby equated with
moral progress.

I

Metahistory - history as long-term development

At one extreme lies the proposition that history tells us most of
what we need to know about the future. Our destiny is disclosed
in the grand trajectory of human history, which reveals the world
today as it really is, and the future course of events. This belief
requires a highly schematic interpretation of the course of human
development, usually known as metabistory. A spiritual version
of it predominated in Western culture until the seventeenth
century. Medieval thinkers believed that history represented the
inexorable unfolding of Divine Providence, from the Creation
through the redeeming life of Christ to the Last Judgement; the
contemplation of the past revealed something of God’s purposes
and concentrated the mind on the reckoning to come. This view
became less tenable with the gradual secularization of European
culture from the eighteenth century onwards. New forms of
metahistory developed which attributed the forward dynamic of
history to human rather than divine action. The Enlightenment
belief in moral progress was of this kind. But the most influential
metahistory of modern times has been Marxism. The driving
force of history became the struggle by human societies to meet
their material needs (which is why the Marxist theory is known
as ‘historical materialism’). Marx interpreted human history as a
progression from lower to higher forms of production; the highest
form was currently industrial capitalism, but this was destined
to give way to socialism, at which point human needs would be
satisfied abundantly and equitably (see Chapter 8). Since the fall
of international communism, belief in historical materialism has
sharply declined, but metahistorical thinking continues to hold
an appeal: Marxism has been turned on its head by certain free-
market theorists, for whom the 1990s signal the global triumph
of liberal democracy, or ‘the end of history’. 1

The rejection of history

totalitarianism

Dictatorship, associated
particularly with European
regimes of the 1 920s and
1930s, which stressed the
all-encompassing role of
the state.

At the other extreme is the view that nothing can be learned from
history: not that history is beyond our reach, but that it offers no
guidance. This rejection of history takes two forms. The first is
essentially a defence against totalitarianism. For many intellect-
uals during the Cold War, the practical consequences of invoking

THE USES OF HISTORY

3 1

the past to legitimate communist ideology had been so appalling
that any idea that history might hold clues for the present became
completely discredited; some historians recoiled so far from any
idea of pattern or meaning that they refused to find in history
anything more than accident, blunder and contingency. 2

The second basis for rejecting history is a commitment to
modernity: if one is committed to the new, why bother with the
past? This point of view has a much longer pedigree. The equation
of modernity with a rejection of the past was first put into effect
during the French Revolution of 1789-93. The revolutionaries
executed the king, abolished the aristocracy, attacked religion
and declared 22 September 1792 the beginning of Year 1. All this
was done in the name of reason, untrammelled by precedent or
tradition. The early twentieth century was another high point in
the modernist rejection of history. In avant-garde thinking human
creativity was seen as opposed to the achievements of the past,
rather than growing out of them; ignorance of history liberated
the imagination. During the inter-war period these ideas became
the dominant strand in the arts, under the banner of ‘modernism’.
Fascism and Nazism adapted this language to the political sphere.
They reacted to the catastrophe of the First World War and the
alarming instability of the world economy by claiming the virtue
of a complete break with the past. They lambasted the corruption
of the old society and demanded the conscious creation of a ‘new
man’ and a ‘new order’. 3 Today, root-and-branch totalitarianism
is completely discredited. But ‘modernism’ retains some of its
allure. It validates a technocratic approach to politics and society
and underwrites the fascination with the new in the arts.

Neither metahistory nor the total rejection of history com-
mands much support among practitioners of history. Metahistory
may cast the historian in the gratifying role of prophet, but at
the cost of denying, or drastically curtailing, the play of human
agency in history. Marxism has had great influence on the writing
of history over the past fifty years, but as a theory of socio-eco-
nomic change rather than as the key to human destiny. Ultimately
the choice between free will and determinism is a philosophical
one. There are many intermediate positions. If most historians
would tip the balance in favour of free will, this is because deter-
minism sits uncomfortably with the contingencies and rough
edges that loom so large in the historical record. Metahistory
involves holding on to one big conviction at the expense of many

modernists

In this context, those
whose concerns are
concentrated on
the modern day to
the exclusion of any
consideration of the past.

avant-garde

(French) The troops at the
front who spearhead an
army's advance into battle.
The term was applied to
radical and pioneering
artistic movements in the
early twentieth century
and has since come to
denote any new or radical
ideas.

alarming instability of
the world economy

The international
economic slump of the
1930s that followed on
from the New York Stock
Exchange crash of October
1929.

root-and-branch

Thorough-going. The
term derives from a
seventeenth-century
religious group who
wanted a comprehensive
reform of the Church of
England.

3 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

antiquarian

Interest in historical details
and artefacts without
reference to their wider
context or significance.

dialectic

The conflict of one idea
(the thesis) and another
diametrically opposed to
it (the antithesis). The
resulting amalgamation of
the two is known as the
synthesis.

less ambitious insights. It is an outlook profoundly at odds with
the experience of historical research.

Historians are no happier to have their findings dismissed as
a complete irrelevance. The rejection of history would obviously
limit its study to a self-indulgent antiquarian pursuit. In fact the
claims for historical awareness have for 200 years been asserted
in a continuing dialectic with the modernist rejection of history.
Historicism itself was to a considerable extent a reaction against
the French Revolution. To conservatives such as Ranke, the polit-
ical excesses in France were a terrifying instance of what happens
when radicals turn their backs on the past; to apply first princi-
ples without respect for inherited institutions was a threat to the
very fabric of the social order. As the Revolution went off course,
many of the radicals acquired a new respect for history too. Those
who still believed in freedom and democracy came to realize that
humans were not so free from the hand of the past as the revolu-
tionaries had supposed, and that progressive change must be built
on the cumulative achievements of earlier generations.

Only a visionary would accept the full implications of meta-
history; only an antiquarian would be content to surrender all
claim to practical utility. The most convincing claims of history to
offer relevant insights lie somewhere between these two extremes.
And they hinge on taking seriously the principles of historical
awareness established by the nineteenth-century founders of the
discipline. The historicists have become a by-word for disinter-
ested historical enquiry without practical application, but this is
not an accurate picture of their position. They did not disclaim all
claims to practical relevance but merely insisted that the faithful
representation of the past must come first. In fact the three prin-
ciples of difference, context and process (discussed in the previous
chapter) point to the specific ways in which the scholarly study
of history can yield useful knowledge. The end result is not a
master-key or an overall schema but rather an accumulation of
specific practical insights consistent with a sense of historical

awareness.

THE USES OF HISTORY

3 3

II

The uses of history - an inventory of alternatives

Historical difference lies at the heart of the discipline’s claim to
be socially relevant. As a memory-bank of what is unfamiliar or
alien, history constitutes our most important cultural resource.
It offers a means - imperfect but indispensable - of entering into
the kind of experience that is simply not possible in our own
lives. Our sense of the heights to which human beings can attain,
and the depths to which they may sink, the resourcefulness they
may show in a crisis, the sensitivity they can show in responding
to each other’s needs - all these are nourished by knowing what
has been thought and done in the very different contexts of the
past. Art historians have long been familiar with the idea that
the creative achievements of the past are an inventory of assets
whose value may be realized by later generations - witness the
way that Western art has repeatedly reinvented and rejected the
classical tradition of Greece and Rome. But creative energy can
be drawn from the past in many other fields. History reminds
us that there is usually more than one way of interpreting a
predicament or responding to a situation, and that the choices
open to us are often more varied than we might have supposed.
Theodore Zeldin has written a magpie’s feast of a book, called An
Intimate History of Humanity (1994), ranging over such subjects
as loneliness, cooking, conversation and travel. His aim is not to
lay bare a pattern, still less to predict or prescribe, but to open
our eyes to the range of options that past experience places at
our disposal. Most historians probably have serious misgivings
about a fragmented exposition such as Zeldin’s, which lacks any
topographical or chronological coherence. But his rationale is not
unusual. Natalie Zemon Davis - a leading cultural historian of
early modern Europe - has said, ‘I let [the past] speak and I show
that things don’t have to be the way they are now ... I want to
show that it could be different, that it was different, and that there
are alternatives’. 4 As the process of historical change unfolds, old
arguments or programmes may once more become relevant. This
has been a persistent theme in the work of the foremost historian
of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill:

Since capitalism, the Protestant ethic, Newtonian physics, so long

taken for granted by our civilization, are now at last coming under

classical tradition

'Classical' refers to the
ancient world of Greece
and Rome. Their ideas
and philosophy were
often revived by later
ages, notably during the
fifteenth and sixteenth-
century Renaissance and
again in the eighteenth
century.

Protestant ethic

Also known as the
Protestant work ethic.

First analysed in detail
by Max Weber in The
Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism (1 905),
this held that Protestant
theology, with its stress
upon an individual
relationship with God (as
opposed to the Catholic
stress on the collective
community of the Church),
was uniquely well suited
to the development of an
independent, self-reliant
approach to work.

Newtonian physics

The understanding of the
operation of the natural
world developed by Sir
Isaac Newton (1642-
1727). Newton's theories
were unchallenged until
the writings of Albert
Einstein (1879-1955).

34

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

general and widespread criticism, it is worth going back to consider
seriously and afresh the arguments of those who opposed them before
they had won universal acceptance . 5

The point is not to find a precedent but to be alert to possibilities.
History is an inventory of alternatives, all the richer if research is
not conducted with half an eye to our immediate situation in the
present.

Lessons from the familiar

Of course not all the past is exotic. In practice our reaction to a
particular moment in the past is likely to be a mixture of estrange-
ment and familiarity. Alongside features that have changed out of
all recognition, we may encounter patterns of thinking or behav-
iour that are immediately accessible to us. The juxtaposition of
these two is an important aspect of historical perspective, and
it is often the point at which the more thoughtful professional
scholar engages most directly with the claims of social relevance.
Peter Laslett’s path-breaking work on the history of the English
family offers a striking instance. Since the 1960s - beginning with
The World We Have Lost (1965) - he has written a succession
of books about the nature of early modern English society. He
emphasizes two general conclusions. First, the residential extended
family, which we fondly believe existed in the pre-modern world,
is a figment of our nostalgic imagination: our forebears lived in
nuclear households seldom spanning more than two generations.
Second, the care of the elderly was not notably more family-
based than it is today, but the scale of the problem was vastly
different - indeed old age was not regarded as a problem at all
because few people survived for very long after their productive
life was over. Our view of the nuclear family is changed when we
recognize that it was not a response to industrialization but was
rooted in much earlier English practice. On the other hand, policy
towards the old will get nowhere if it is guided by past models:
‘Our situation remains irreducibly novel’, writes Laslett; ‘it calls
for invention rather than imitation’. 6 He does not trace the evo-
lution of family forms over time - the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries are missed out entirely. His point is rather that the first
step to understanding is comparison across time, which throws
into relief what is transient and what is enduring about our
present circumstances.

THE USES OF HISTORY

The ability to distinguish between the enduring and the tran-
sient is vital to any realistic programme of social action in the
present. Consider, for example, another aspect of the history of
old people - state provision in the form of a pension. Historical
perspective is usually limited to the establishment of the Welfare
State after the Second World War, with perhaps a backward
glance to the introduction of old age pensions by Lloyd George
in 1908. But these antecedents do not explain why the level
of the pension has consistently been fixed at below subsist-
ence level. Here, as Pat Thane explains, the relevant past is the
nineteenth-century Poor Law administration, accountable to local
rate-payers, and concerned to allocate the barest minimum to
every category of claimant. 7 History here is not being quarried
for ‘meaning’ to validate particular values but is treated as an
instrument for maximizing our control over our present situa-
tion. To be free is not to enjoy total freedom of action - that is a
Utopian dream - but to know how far one’s action and thought
are conditioned by the heritage of the past. This may sound like
a prescription for conservatism. But what it offers is a realistic
foundation for radical initiatives. We need to know when we are
pushing against an open door and when we are beating our heads
against a brick wall. Grasping what one historian has called ‘the
distinction between what is necessary and what is the product
merely of our own contingent arrangements’ offers important
practical dividends. 8

Facing up to pain: history as therapy

The concept of historical difference has one other rather sur-
prising application - as a means of grappling with aspects of the
very recent past that we might prefer to forget. It is a measure
of the almost incredible extremes of human behaviour over the
past century that a real effort of the imagination is now needed
to understand what happened under the Third Reich or in the
Soviet Union under Stalin (more recent instances include Idi
Amin’s Uganda and Pol Pot’s Cambodia). In cases such as these
the gulf between present and past is, as it were, compressed into
a single life-span. Those who lived through these experiences of
mass death, incarceration and forced removal suffer from a collec-
tive trauma. The line of least resistance may be to leave the past
alone, and in the Soviet Union ‘forgetting’ was the official line for

Idi Amin (1925-2003)

General Amin seized power
in Uganda in 1971 in a
military coup. He proved
a brutal dictator and
massacred large numbers
of his own people. He
expelled Uganda's entire
Asian population and
was finally overthrown
by a military invasion by
neighbouring Tanzania in
1979.

Pol Pot (1925-1998)

Communist leader of
Cambodia 1975-9. He
instituted a reign of terror
in which the entire urban
population was forced
into the countryside and
some two million people
were massacred. He was
overthrown by an invasion
from neighbouring
Vietnam.

3 e

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Mikhail Gorbachev
(1931-)

Soviet leader 1 985-91 .

Gorbachev instituted
the policy of glasnost
(openness) in discussing
the failures of the

Soviet system, and
of fundamental

reconstruction
( perestroika ) of Soviet
society. This precipitated
the collapse of the Soviet
Union, and Gorbachev
resigned in the aftermath
of an attempted coup in
1991.

most of the period between the death of Stalin and the collapse
of communism. Individuals did not forget, but there was no way
in which their pain could be shared or publicly marked. A nation
that cannot face up to its past will be gravely handicapped in the
future. This understanding was central to the policy of glasnost
(‘openness’) proclaimed by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s.
He realized how crippling the psychological burden of the past
was as long as it remained buried. After some initial hesitation,
he opened up the archives to historians and allowed the Soviet
people to acknowledge publicly the terrible sufferings of the Stalin
era. Whatever else happens in Russia in the future, that collective
owning of the past cannot be undone. James Joll saw this kind of
painful engagement with the recent past in therapeutic terms:

Just as the psycho-analyst helps us to face the world by showing us
how to face the truth about our own motives and our own personal
past, so the contemporary historian helps us to face the present and
the future by enabling us to understand the forces, however shocking,
which have made our world and our society what it is. 9

Historical difference provides an indispensable perspective on the
present, whether as an inventory of experience, as evidence of the
transience of our own time, or as a reminder of the deeply alien
elements in our recent past.

social anthropology

Academic discipline that
analyses small-scale
societies by the techniques
of participant observation.

Ill

Understanding behaviour in its context

The practical applications of historical context are much less
likely to make the headlines, but they are no less important. As
explained in Chapter 1, the discipline of context springs from
the historian’s conviction that a sense of the whole must always
inform our understanding of the parts. Even when historians
write about specialized topics in economic or intellectual history,
they should respect this principle, and they open themselves to
major criticism if they fail to do so. The same principle informs
the practice of social anthropology, where fieldwork is concerned
as much with the entire social structure or cultural system as with
particular rituals or beliefs. The problem both history and anthro-
pology face is how to interpret behaviour that may be founded
on quite different premises from our own. It would, for example,
be a great mistake to suppose that commercial transactions in

THE USES OF HISTORY

37

thirteenth-century England - or twentieth-century Polynesia -
were guided solely by what we define as economic rationality;
looking at these societies as wholes will give us a grasp of how
trade and exchange were informed by religion, social morality
and social hierarchy (to specify only the most likely dimensions).
The reason why this mode of thinking has contemporary applica-
tion is not, of course, that our own society is alien or ‘different’.
Rather, the problem today is the baffling complexity of society,
which leads us to place exaggerated faith in specialist expertise,
without proper regard to the wider picture. E.J. Elobsbawm
deplores how modern policy-making and planning are in thrall to
‘a model of scientism and technical manipulation’. 10 This is more
than prejudice born of a demarcation dispute between arts and
sciences (Elobsbawm himself has always been respectful of science
and technology). The argument here is that the technical approach
to social and political problems compartmentalizes human expe-
rience into boxes marked ‘economics’, ‘social policy’ and so on,
each with its own technical lore, whereas what is really required
is an openness to the way in which human experience constantly
breaks out of these categories.

The lateral links between different aspects of society are much
easier to discern with the benefit of hindsight. In our own time it
is clearly harder to spot the connections, given our lack of detach-
ment and our lack of hindsight. But at the very least a historical
training should encourage a less blinkered approach to current
problems. The Gulf War in 1991 illustrates this point - if in a
regrettably negative way. The history of Western imperialism has
been the subject of some highly sophisticated analysis over the
past forty years. Historians do not see the process of European
expansion merely as an expression of maritime flair and technical
superiority. They link it to economic structures, patterns of con-
sumption and international relations - and increasingly to codes
of masculinity and constructions of racial difference as well. All
too little of this kind of contextualization was applied by the
media to the escalation of conflict in the Gulf. For most com-
mentators it was hardly seen outside the frame of international
law and the politics of oil. Historians can claim with some justice
to be specialists in lateral thinking, and this has underpinned
their traditional claim to train graduates for management and the
civil service, where the ability to think beyond the boundaries of
particular technical perspectives is at a premium. A similar case

Gulf War

In 1990 President Saddam
Hussain of Iraq invaded
and annexed the small
oil-rich kingdom of
Kuwait. The invasion
was condemned by the
United Nations, and the
Iraqis were forced out of
Kuwait the following year
by a counter-invasion
by a broad international
coalition led by the United
States.

38

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)

As well as his multi-
volume histories of the
two World Wars, Churchill
also wrote a detailed
biography of his famous
ancestor, John Churchill,
Duke of Marlborough.

Roy Jenkins
(1920-2003)

Served as Home Secretary
and Chancellor of the
Exchequer under the
Labour Prime Ministers
Wilson and Callaghan, as
President of the European
Commission, and was
one of the founders of
the short-lived Social
Democratic Party (SDP).

He also found time to
write critically acclaimed
biographies of Gladstone
and Churchill.

Machiavelli (1469-1527)

Niccolo Machiavelli,
Florentine statesman
and philosopher. When
Florence overthrew the
ruling Medici dynasty and
declared itself a republic
in 1493 Machiavelli served
the new regime, but he
was arrested and tortured
when the Medici returned.
Machiavelli is best known
for his book of advice for
rulers. The Prince, which
suggests that the most
successful rulers should
know how to deceive and
dissemble. It earned him a
quite unjust reputation as
a promoter of unprincipled
tyranny.

can be made in relation to the education of the participating
citizen, who inevitably approaches most public issues as a non-
specialist. 11

Does history repeat itself?

Context is also the principle that historians invoke against the
common, but mistaken, belief that history repeats itself. Human
beings strive to learn from their mistakes and successes in their
collective life just as they do in everyday individual experience.
Historical biography is said to feature prominently in the leisure
reading of British politicians. Indeed a few of them have written dis-
tinguished works of this kind - Winston Churchill and Roy Jenkins,
for example. 12 That politicians have a lively interest in the historical
context in which posterity will judge their own standing is only
part of the explanation. The real reason for their study of history
is that politicians expect to find a guide to their conduct - in the
form not of moral example but of practical lessons in public affairs.
This approach to history has a long pedigree. It was particularly
pronounced during the Renaissance, when the record of classical
antiquity was treated as a storehouse of moral example and prac-
tical lessons in statecraft. Machiavelli’s prescriptions for his native
Florence and his famous political maxims in The Prince (1513)
were both based on Roman precedent. He was justly rebuked by his
younger contemporary, the historian Francesco Guicciardini:

How wrong it is to cite the Romans at every turn. For any
comparison to be valid, it would be necessary to have a city with
conditions like theirs, and then to govern it according to their
example. In the case of a city with different qualities, the comparison
is as much out of order as it would be to expect a jackass to race like
a horse . 13

Guicciardini put his finger on the principal objection to the citing
of precedent, that it usually shows scant regard for historical
context. For the precedent to be valid, the same conditions would
have to prevail, but the result of the passage of time is that what
looks like an old problem or a familiar opportunity requires a dif-
ferent analysis because the attendant circumstances have changed.
The gulf that separates us from all previous ages renders the citing
of precedents from the distant past a fruitless enterprise.

Only in the case of the recent past have historians seriously
attempted to draw on historical analogies, on the grounds that

THE USES OF HISTORY

3 9

much of the context may remain essentially the same over a short
period and that the changes which have occurred are compara-
tively well documented. During the later stages of the Cold War
there was something of a vogue for ‘applied’ history of this kind. 14
But even here the task is a daunting one. Consider the case of the
arms race. The decade before the Second World War is commonly
regarded as an object lesson in the dangers of military weakness
and of appeasing an aggressive power. But one could equally cite
the precedent of the First World War, one of whose causes was
the relentless escalation in armaments from the 1890s onwards.
Which precedent is valid? The answer must be: neither as it
stands. Even within the time-span of a hundred years, history does
not repeat itself. No one historical situation has been, or ever can
be, repeated in every particular. If an event or tendency recurs, as
the arms race has done, it is as a result of a unique combination
of circumstances, and the strategies we adopt must have regard
primarily to those circumstances. 15 The key historicist notion of
the ‘otherness’ of the past is not suspended merely because we
stand at only two or three generations’ distance from our object
of study. As Hobsbawm has reminded us, the atmosphere of the
1930s (through which he lived) was utterly different from today’s,
which makes any comparison between the original Nazis and their
imitators today pretty pointless. 16 At the same time, the drawing
of historical analogies, often half consciously, is a habitual and
unavoidable part of human reasoning to which people in public
life are especially prone. It is not necessarily futile, provided we
do not look for a perfect fit between past and present, or treat
precedent as grounds for closing critical debate about the options
available now.

The truth that history never repeats itself also limits the confi-
dence with which historians can predict. However probable it may
seem that a recurrence of this or that factor will result in a familiar
outcome, the constant process of historical change means that the
future will always be partly shaped by additional factors that we
cannot predict and whose bearing on the problem in hand no one
could have suspected. Moreover, when people do perceive their
situation as ‘history repeating itself’, their actions will be affected
by their knowledge of what happened the first time. As E.H.
Carr pointed out, historical precedent gives us some insight into
what kind of conditions make for a revolution, but whether and
when the revolution breaks out in a specific instance will depend

40

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

on ‘the occurrence of unique events, which cannot themselves be
predicted ’. 17 The dismal record of well-informed intelligent people
who have made false predictions, or have failed to predict what
with hindsight seems obvious, does however suggest one lesson
of history: that control of the future is an illusion, and that living
with uncertainty is part of the human condition.

IV

The way ahead: history and sequential prediction

Process - the third principle of historicism - is equally productive
of insights into the present day. Identifying a process does not
mean that we agree with it, or believe that it made for a better
world. But it may help to explain our world. Situating ourselves
in a trajectory that is still unfolding gives us some purchase on
the future and allows a measure of forward planning. In fact
this mode of historical thinking is deeply rooted in our political
culture. As voters and citizens, almost instinctively, we interpret
the world around us in terms of historical process. Much of the

South Africa's Truth
and Reconciliation
Commission provided a
forum where those who
had committed crimes in
the name of apartheid
could admit openly what
they had done and receive
forgiveness from their
victims. This process of
facing up to a painful
recent past proved helpful
in allowing South Africans
to work together to face
the future.

(Topfoto/lmage Works)

THE USES OF HISTORY

41

time our assumptions are not grounded in historical reality; they
may amount to little more than wishful thinking projected back-
wards. But if conclusions about historical process are based on
careful research, they can yield modest but useful predictions.
We might call these sequential predictions, in order to distinguish
them from the discredited repetitive or recurrent variety. These
prevailing beliefs about historical process need to be brought into
the light of day, tested against the historical record, and if neces-
sary replaced by a more accurate perspective.

One prediction based on historical process which has stood the
test of time concerns the political destiny of South Africa. During
the 1960s, when most colonies in tropical Africa were securing
their political independence, it was widely assumed that majority
rule would shortly come about in South Africa too. Despite the
weight of white oppression, mass nationalism was visibly the
outcome of a process that dated back to the foundation of the
African National Congress in 1912, and that had been marked
by a growing sophistication in both political discourse and tech-
niques of mass mobilization. Moreover, the South African case
could be seen as part of a worldwide phenomenon of anti-colonial
nationalism which had been building up since the late nineteenth
century. In that sense history might be said to be ‘on the side’ of
African nationalism in South Africa. What could not be predicted
was the form of the succeeding political order, and the manner in
which it would be achieved, whether by revolution from below
or by devolution from above: those were matters of detail which
only the future could divulge. But the direction in which the his-
torical process was unfolding in South Africa seemed clear. The
time-scale turned out to be more extended than had been sup-
posed - thus demonstrating the crab-like way in which a historical
process may unfold - but the general prediction was accurate
enough. 18

Sometimes identifying the valid and appropriate historical
process is complicated by the presence of more than one pos-
sible trajectory. Take the current debate about the ‘breakdown’
of the family. Processual thinking is certainly very evident in the
way the media handle this issue. The relevant process is generally
seen to be the decline of personal morality, aided and abetted by
misguided legislation, beginning with the Matrimonial Causes
Act of 1857, which set in train the liberalization of divorce. 19
Historians, on the other hand, bring into play a much more

African National
Congress

The black South African
political party, founded in
1912, which led resistance
to apartheid.

Matrimonial Causes Act

This act of 1857 enabled
couples to seek divorce
through the newly
created divorce courts.
Previously, it had only
been obtainable through
a specially passed Act of
Parliament.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

42

fundamental and long-term process, namely the changing role
of the home in production. Some 250 years ago most work was
done in or adjacent to the home. In selecting a mate, prospective
spouses were influenced as much by the home-making and bread-
winning skills of their partners as by their personal attractions;
the ending of a marriage through separation or desertion meant
the end of a productive unit, and for this reason most marriages
endured until death. The Industrial Revolution changed all this:
the growth of the factory (and other large firms) meant that most
production no longer took place in a domestic setting, and control
over domestic dependants ceased to be economically central. Now
that personal fulfilment is by far the most compelling rationale
of marriage, there is far less reason for people to stay in family
relationships that no longer bring them happiness. The decline
of the productive household, rather than a collapse of individual
morality, would seem to be the critical historical process involved
here; and given that the separation of work from home shows
little sign of being reversed, it is a reasonable prediction that our
society will continue to experience a comparatively high rate of
marital breakdown. 20

Union of Scotland and
England

The Act of Union between
England and Scotland was
passed by both countries'
Parliaments in 1707.
Although there were
economic advantages to
both sides, the English
wanted it primarily to
prevent the Catholic
pretender. Prince James
Edward Stuart, becoming
king of Scotland. The act
only passed through the
Scottish Parliament with
the help of wholesale
bribery.

Questioning assumptions

But the most important role of processual thinking is in offering
an alternative to the assumptions of permanence and timeless-
ness that underpin so many social identities. As we saw in the
last chapter, nations tend to imagine themselves as unchanged
by the vicissitudes of time. The fallacy of essentialism does not
hold up well against historical research. ‘British’, for example,
was in the eighteenth century a newly minted category to take
account of the recent Union of Scotland and England, and it was
built on the exclusion of Roman Catholics and the French. At
the beginning of the twenty-first century, the cultural meaning of
Britishness is probably less certain than it has ever been, while the
British state seems set for disintegration as Scotland edges closer
to independence. 21 In the same way, any notion of what it means
to be German has to come to terms not only with the multitude of
states under which most Germans lived until the mid-nineteenth
century but also with the political calculations that led to the
exclusion of many German-speaking lands (notably Austria) from
the German Empire in 1871. A historical perspective requires us

THE USES OF HISTORY

43

to abandon the idea that nations are organic; it is nearer the truth
to regard them, in the words of an influential text, as ‘imagined
communities ’. 22

The term ‘race’ raises similar problems. In its modern form,
‘race’ was originally developed as a category that justified the
growing ascendancy of the West over other peoples. It treated as
fixed and biologically determined what is socially constructed,
and it has been most strongly developed as a means of reinforcing
political and economic control over subordinate groups (as in
colonial Africa and Nazi Germany). The way in which an earlier
generation of historians wrote about Western global expansion
strongly implied that the ‘native’ peoples at the receiving end
were inferior both in their indigenous culture and in their capacity
to assimilate Western techniques; and these negative stereotypes
served in turn to sustain a flattering self-image of the British - or
French or German - ‘race’. More recently, minorities with a strong
ethnic identity have constructed what might be called a ‘reverse
discourse’; they too embrace the concept of ‘race’, because the
term brings biological descent and culture together in a powerful
amalgam that maximizes group cohesion and emphasizes distance
from other groups. Among blacks in America and Britain there is
today rising support for Afrocentrism - the belief in an absolute
sense of ethnic difference and in the transmission of an authentic
cultural tradition from Africa to blacks of the modern diaspora.
A stress on common ancestry and a downplaying of outside influ-
ences lead to a kind of ‘cultural insiderism’. The appropriate
response is to point out that no nation has ever been ethnically
homogeneous and to stress the formative experience of slavery
and other forms of culture contact between black and white in
Europe and the New World. The purpose of historical work is not
to undermine black identity but to anchor it in a real past instead
of a mythical construction. The outcome is likely to bear a rather
closer relation to the circumstances in which black and white
people live today. The formation of racial and national identities
is never a once-and-for-all event, but a continuous and contingent
process . 23

diaspora

The dispersal of a people
over a wide area.

homogeneous

All of the same sort.

Challenging notions of ‘natural’

What is true of the nation applies still more to the ‘natural’.
When unwelcome changes in our social arrangements are afoot,

44

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

entrepreneurial widow

We now know that many
widows in seventeenth
and eighteenth-century
England ran their own
businesses, and that it
was by no means unusual
for women to assume
positions of influence
that historians had long
assumed were reserved
for men.

abolition of slavery

The campaign for the
abolition first of the
transatlantic slave trade,
then of slavery itself, and
later of the internal African
slave trade, constituted
one of the most important
and influential lobbying
movements of the
nineteenth century.

Church groups and women
played a prominent role in
the process on both sides
of the Atlantic.

we often express our attachment to what is being replaced by
asserting that it has always been there - that what is changing is
not one particular phase with a limited time-span but something
traditional, or fundamental, or ‘natural’. This is especially true of
gender. The ‘traditional’ role of women looks less and less tenable
when we read about the entrepreneurial widow of seventeenth-
century England, or the groundswell of women’s organizations
that worked for the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century,
well ahead of the agitation for women’s suffrage. 24 The new
history of men and masculinity is equally unsettling of received
truths. Traditional fatherhood is often thought to have combined
an emotionally hands-off approach with a distinctly hands-on
approach to family discipline. That is usually what is meant by
‘Victorian’ fatherhood. But in so far as the Victorians kept their
distance from their children and meted out harsh punishments
to them, this was a reaction against the past, rather than the
climax of a long tradition. The celebrated political journalist
William Cobbett recalled that his time as a young father was
spent ‘between the pen and the baby’; he remembered how he had
fed and put his babies to sleep ‘hundreds of times, though there
were servants to whom the task might have been transferred’. 25
Cobbett was writing in 1830, just when the tide was beginning to
turn against the close paternal involvement with young children
that had been so common when he was a young man thirty years
before. It makes a difference now to know that a fully engaged
fatherhood today is not some Utopian fantasy but a pattern that
has existed within English culture in the comparatively recent
past. In fact codes of fatherhood have been in continuous flux
throughout the past 200 years, and probably earlier. 26 One of the
most salutary influences on the practice of history in recent years
has been the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault.
His cardinal principle was that no aspect of human culture is
God-given or lies outside history, and in his historical work he
plotted some of the major shifts that have occurred in the human
experience of sexuality, sickness and insanity. In selecting major
themes of this kind in pursuit of what he called ‘an archaeology
of the present’, Foucault achieved an influence that extended far
beyond academia. 27

THE USES OF HISTORY

45

V

History for its own sake?

Granted, then, that history has a varied and significant practical
relevance, the question remains whether this should influence
the way in which historians set about their work. Prior to the
Rankean revolution, this question could hardly have arisen.
Historians believed what their audience assumed, that a historical
education offered a training for citizens and statesmen alike.
They took it for granted that history furnished the basis for a
rational analysis of politics; indeed, many of the best historians,
from Guicciardini in the sixteenth century to Macaulay in the
nineteenth, were active in public life. All this was changed by the
professionalization of history. By the late nineteenth century the
subject featured prominently in the university curriculum all over
Europe, controlled by a new breed of historians whose careers
were largely confined to academic life. Their subject’s traditional
claim to offer practical guidance seemed irrelevant - almost an
embarrassment. They adhered strictly to the central tenet of his-
toricism, that history should be studied for its own sake, without
paying much attention to the practical benefits that could accrue
from this approach. This attitude has been very influential with
the historical profession in Britain. A generation of conservative
historians was inspired by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott,
who deplored what he called the ‘practical attitude to the past;’
he regarded it as ‘the chief undefeated enemy of “history ”’. 28 G.R.
Elton was an outspoken champion of the prevailing orthodoxy:

Teachers of history must set their faces against the necessarily
ignorant demands of ‘society’ . . . for immediate applicability. They
need to recall that the ‘usefulness’ of historical studies lies hardly at
all in the knowledge they purvey and in the understanding of specific
present problems from their prehistory; it lies much more in the fact
that they produce standards of judgement and powers of reasoning
which they alone develop, which arise from their very essence, and
which are unusually clear-headed, balanced and compassionate . 29

Apart from providing an intellectual training, the study of history
is represented as a personal pursuit which at most enables the
individual to achieve some self-awareness by stepping outside his
or her immediate experience; in the austere formulation of V.H.
Galbraith, ‘the study of history is a personal matter, in which

Macaulay (1800-59)

Thomas Babington
Macaulay, British historian,
poet and administrator.

As well as writing a best-
selling History of England,
Macaulay served on the
Council of the Governor-
General of India, as MP
for Edinburgh, and as
Secretary at War in the
government of Lord
Melbourne.

46

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

the activity is generally more valuable than the result’. 30 Neither
of these justifications is peculiar to history: training the mind is
part of all academic disciplines worth the name, while the claim
to enlarge the individual’s experience can be argued with equal, if
not greater, conviction by teachers of literature.

It should be noted that there was a political context to this
fastidious recoil from ‘relevance’. Both Elton and Galbraith had in
mind the excesses of propaganda to which relevant history had led
under the regimes of Hitler and Stalin (Elton was a refugee from
Nazi Germany): Nazi and Soviet historians were state employees,
expected to repeat crude party dogma about the past. In Europe
totalitarian excesses on that scale are a thing of the past, but
in many countries historical scholarship is still vulnerable to
political pressure, especially of a nationalist kind. Against that
background, scholarly detachment can seem virtuous. As Peter
Mandler has suggested, ‘historians shy away from considering
the uses of their discipline for fear of stirring up dying chauvinist
embers’. 31

One positive result of ‘history for its own sake’ is a whole-
hearted commitment to the re-creation or resurrection of the past
in every material and mental dimension. There are historians
for whom a fascination with the past as it was really lived and
experienced overrides all other considerations. A notable case was
Richard Cobb, a leading historian of the French Revolution:

The historian should, above all, be endlessly inquisitive and prying,
constantly attempting to force the privacy of others, and to cross
the frontiers of class, nationality, generation, period, and sex. His
principal aim is to make the dead live. And, like the American
‘mortician’, he may allow himself a few artifices of the trade: a touch
of rouge here, a pencil-stroke there, a little cotton wool in the cheeks,
to make the operation more convincing . 32 [emphasis added]

Death in Paris

Richard Cobb (1917-96)
was a colourful British
authority on the history
of France. Death in
Paris gives a glimpse
of the social history of
nineteenth-century Paris
through a collection of
police records relating to
dead bodies fished out of
the Seine.

Cobb’s marvellously evocative studies of the seamy side of life in
revolutionary France, notably Death in Paris (1978), certainly vin-
dicate his approach. Probably all historians can trace their vocation
back to a curiosity about the past for its own sake, often aroused in
childhood by the visible relics of the past around them. And there
will always, one hopes, be historians like Cobb with special gifts
in the re-creation of the past. But it is quite wrong to suppose that
historians in general should be content with this. For most of them
it is the essential preliminary to explaining the past. Their purpose

THE USES OF HISTORY

47

is to identify trends, to analyse causes and consequences - in short
to interpret history as a process and not just as a series of brightly
coloured lantern-slides. Thus historians of the English Revolution
approach their work with a view to discovering not only what
happened in the Civil War or what it felt like to be a soldier in the
New Model Army but also why the war occurred and what changes
it brought about in the nature of English politics and society. Or
to take a more distant example: the events of the Anglo-Zulu War
of 1879, which saw the dissolution of the Zulu kingdom and the
destruction of an entire British regiment, were tragic enough; but
a whole other dimension of irony and pathos is revealed when
we consider the betrayals, the mutual misunderstandings and
the culture conflict that set the two sides on a collision course. 33
This represents the other side of historicism. Without it, history’s
practical explanatory functions could not be fulfilled at all. (The
distinction between re-creation and explanation is further explored
in Chapter 6.)

The rejection of relevance

However, it is perfectly possible for historical explanation to be
pursued without reference to the claims of social relevance, and
this, rather than the strictly ‘resurrectionist’ position, represents
the mainstream academic view. For explanation, too, can be
sought ‘for its own sake’. Topics such as the origins of the First
World War or the social welfare provision of the Victorians can
be tackled in an entirely self-contained way without any recogni-
tion that they might have a bearing on the choices available to
us today. Academic syllabuses are sometimes drawn up on the
assumption that history consists of a number of core themes and
episodes of permanent significance which, because they have
generated extensive research and debate, offer the best material
for training the intellect. New areas of study such as the history
of Africa or the history of the family are dismissed as passing
fancies peripheral to ‘real history’. Commenting on the gradual
retreat from big, contentious topics in university teaching, David
Cannadine writes:

The belief that history provides an education, that it helps
us understand ourselves in time, or even that it explains
something of how the present world came into being, has all
but vanished . 34

New Model Army

The highly trained
professional army created
by Parliament during the
English Civil Wars (1642-
9). It is usually credited
with having turned the
tide of the war against
King Charles I.

Anglo-Zulu War

Also known as the Zulu
War (1879). It began with
a completely unprovoked
British military invasion of
Zululand in South Africa,
after which an entire
British army column was
wiped out by the Zulu at
Isandhlwana. In the end,
superior technology and
firepower enabled the
British to defeat the Zulu.

48

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

It is hard not to detect a fundamental conservatism in these
attitudes: if history is defined to exclude anything that smacks
of ‘relevance’, it is less likely to call into question the dominant
mythologies of today or suggest radical alternatives to current
institutions. This explains why ‘relevant’ historical enquiry attracts
charges of irreverent muckraking . 35 There can be little doubt that
conservatives are disproportionately represented in the ranks of
the historical profession. As noted earlier, the triumph of histori-
cism during the nineteenth century owed much to the strength of
the conservative reaction to the French Revolution. It remains
the case that the study of the past often attracts those who are
hostile to the direction of social and political change in their
own day and who find comfort in an earlier and more congenial
order. This outlook has been marked in English local history: the
writings of W.G. Hoskins, a formative influence on this field, are
suffused with a nostalgic regret for the passing of the old English
rural society . 36

Disclaimers of social relevance are not, however, usually
couched in explicitly conservative terms. They are more commonly
defended on the grounds that ‘relevant’ history is incompatible
with the historian’s primary obligation to be true to the past,
and with the requirements of scholarly objectivity. This argument
has a wide currency among academic historians, being supported
by many who are not conservative in other respects but who see
their professional integrity at stake. But whether grounded in a
conservative attitude or not, the denial of practical relevance is
unduly cautious. It is entirely understandable that the original
champions of the new historical consciousness should have dis-
tanced themselves from topicality, because they were only too
aware how severely their subject had suffered at the hands of
prophets and propagandists in the past. But the battle for schol-
arly standards of historical enquiry within the profession has long
since been won. Practical purposes can be entertained without
sacrificing standards of scholarship - partly because professional
historians are so zealous in scrutinizing each other’s work for
bias.

Relevant fields of historical study

Historians should, of course, strive to be true to the past; the
question is, which past? Faced with the almost limitless evidence

THE USES OF HISTORY

49

of human activity and the need to select certain problems or
periods as more deserving of attention than others, the historian
is entirely justified in allowing current social concerns to affect
his or her choice. International history originated in the 1920s as
a very positive contribution by historians to the new - if short-
lived - ethos of internationalism. The notable broadening of the
scope of historical enquiry during the past fifty years is largely
the result of a small minority of historians responding to the
demands of topicality. The crisis in America’s cities during the
1960s brought into being the ‘new urban history’, with its stress
on the history of social mobility, minority group politics and
inner-city deprivation. African history was developed at about
the same time in Africa and the West by historians who believed
that it was indispensable both to the prospects of the newly
independent states and to the outside world’s understanding of
the ‘dark continent’. More recently, women’s history has grown
rapidly as traditional gender roles have been modified in the
family, the workplace and public life. In each of these areas the
door has been opened to alternative possibilities, to paths not
taken, and to conditioning factors whose influence still weighs on
the present. In none of these areas has historical enquiry simply
confirmed the obvious. As Harold James has put it, ‘history has
a peculiar legitimacy when it tells us something unexpected about
current problems’. 37

Obviously new areas of history which proclaim their rel-
evance run the risk of being manipulated by ideologues. But the
responsibility of historians in these cases is clear: it is to provide a
historical perspective that can inform debate rather than to service
any particular ideology. Responding to the call of ‘relevance’
is not a matter of falsifying or distorting the past but rather of
rescuing from oblivion aspects of that past that now speak to us
more directly. Historians of Africa, for example, should be con-
cerned to explain the historical evolution of African societies, not
to create a nationalist mythology, and one of the consequences of
five decades of research and writing is that it is now much easier
to distinguish between the two than it used to be. Our priorities in
the present should determine the questions we ask of the past, but
not the answers. As will be shown later in the book, the discipline
of historical study makes this a meaningful distinction. At the
same time, it is a fallacy to suppose that the aspiration to recon-
struct the past in its own terms carries the promise of objectivity:

crisis in America's cities

The mid-1960s saw serious
rioting in a large number
of American cities. The
riots began in 1965 in
the Watts district of Los
Angeles, where young
working-class blacks
were protesting against
the poverty and squalor
in which they lived, but
soon spread across the
whole nation. The country
erupted in further violence
after the assassination of
Dr Martin Luther King in
1968.

dark continent

The standard Victorian
nickname for Africa. It
referred both to the colour
of Africans' skin and to
the fact that so little
was known in the West
about the interior of the
continent.

50

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

chimera

A creature of the
imagination, an illusion.

no essay in historical re-creation is proof against the values of the
enquirer (see Chapter 7).

Public history

But historians who renounce relevance in the cause of objective
knowledge are not only pursuing a chimera; they are also evading
a wider responsibility. Intellectual curiosity about the past for its
own sake is certainly one reason why people read history, but it
is not the only one. Society also expects an interpretation of the
past that is relevant to the present and a basis for formulating
decisions about the future. Historians may argue that since their
expertise concerns the past not the present, it is not their job to
draw out the practical import of their work. But they are in fact
the only people qualified to equip society with a truly historical
perspective and to save it from the damaging effects of exposure
to historical myth. If professionally trained historians do not carry
out these functions, then others who are less well informed and
more prejudiced will produce ill-founded interpretations. What
Geoffrey Barraclough, a veteran champion of contemporary
values in history, said more than fifty years ago applies with equal
force today:

Man is an historical animal, with a deep sense of his own past; and
if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true, he will
integrate it by a history implicit and false. The challenge is one which
no historian with any conviction of the value of his work can ignore;
and the way to meet it is not to evade the issue of ‘relevance’, but to
accept the fact and work out its implications . 38

One of those implications is to develop channels through which
a wider public can be addressed. If some (at least) of historians’
work touches on questions of topical interest, they surely have an
obligation to write for a readership that goes well beyond their
academic peers and their students; they should engage in public
history. Thirty years ago this was an unfamiliar concept. It is now
well understood, but with a somewhat broader definition than the
context in which I am using it here. Public history is an umbrella
term to cover the varied ways in which historians make a public
impact. The best known of these is the advisory work that
scholars carry out for heritage institutions, particularly museums.
‘Public history’ is also sufficiently elastic to include both com-
munity projects (working with local history groups, for example)

THE USES OF HISTORY

5 1

and policy advice for government departments. All these activities
help to raise the profile of the profession with the public; all of
them contribute to the level of historical knowledge in society.
But advocates of public history sometimes lose sight of what, in
a liberal democracy, is its most critical function: disseminating
historical perspective on weighty or contentious public issues.

Very occasionally a court case provides the means of doing
so. In 2000 the historicity of the Holocaust was put to the test
when a leading ‘revisionist’ historian, David Irving, claimed that
Deborah Lipstadt, an American academic, and her publisher,
Penguin Books, had libelled him by describing him as a ‘Holocaust
denier’ who suppressed and distorted the documentary record. In
order to rebut the charges, the defence needed to prove both that
Irving was dishonest in his use of evidence, and that the historical
events which he denied had actually taken place. As a result, the
views of professional historians were as central to the case as the
arguments of legal counsel. One historian, Richard Evans, was
retained specifically to investigate the validity of Irving’s research
procedures by tracing his statements back to the sources on which
they were purportedly based. For three months the court heard
a mountain of evidence of this kind. The verdict, delivered in a
350-page judgment, was an unequivocal defeat for Irving: he was
found to have flouted accepted research methods and to have
manipulated the evidence to suit his political prejudices. The case
not only diminished the credibility of Holocaust denial; it also
showed that what professional historians do matters - that some
events in the past can be authenticated beyond reasonable doubt,
and that society has a vested interest in the maintenance of schol-
arly standards. 39

Alongside a high-profile event of this kind, historians fulfil
their public history brief by writing for a lay readership books
that bring a critical and informed perspective to current affairs.
Most promising - because it testifies to an ongoing commitment
- is the History and Policy website, founded in 2002 as a window
of topical historical research aimed at policy-makers and the
general public. 40 It has now posted over sixty papers. The majority
put forward a historical perspective on social issues - policing,
adolescent crime, girls’ performance in school, and so on; a smaller
number engage with international topics like the Iraq war. The
format of these papers - a maximum of 4,000 words and no foot-
notes - has drawn allegations of dumbing down. But if historians

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

5 2

are to fulfil their social obligations and reach a public audience,
they have to modify their mode of presentation accordingly.
Treating the conventions of academic discourse as non-negotiable
is a sure way of cutting off historians from their public audience.

The need for contemporary history

One implication of public history is that the recent past has a
strong claim on historians. This is the province of contemporary
history , usually defined as the period within living memory (a
favoured starting point is the end of the Cold War in 1989-92).
It can be argued that scholars today are too close to the events
of this period to achieve sufficient detachment, and that they are
further handicapped by their limited access to confidential records
(see Chapter 4). But although the job cannot be done as well as
historians would like, it is important that they do it to the best of
their ability. For it is the recent past on which people draw most
for historical analogies and predictions, and their knowledge of it
needs to be soundly based if they are to avoid serious error. The
recent past has also often proved a fertile breeding ground for
crude myths - all the more powerful when their credibility is not
contested by scholarly work. Academic neglect of contemporary
history therefore has dangerous consequences.

VI

A cultural subject, or a social science?

The argument of this chapter can be briefly summed up by situating
history in the context of its neighbours among the academic disci-
plines. Traditionally history has been counted, along with literary
and artistic studies, as one of the humanities. The fundamental
premise of these disciplines is that what mankind has thought and
done has an intrinsic interest and a lasting value irrespective of any
practical implications. The re-creation of episodes and ambiences
in the past has the same kind of claim on our attention as the re-
creation of the thought expressed in a work of art or literature. The
historian, like the literary critic and art historian, is a guardian of
our cultural heritage, and familiarity with that heritage offers insight
into the human condition - a means to heightened self-awareness
and empathy with others. In this sense history is, in Cobb’s phrase,

THE USES OF HISTORY

5 3

‘a cultural subject, enriching in itself’ 41 and any venture in historical
reconstruction is worth doing.

By contrast the social sciences owe their position to their
promise of practical guidance. Economists and sociologists seek to
understand the workings of economy and society with a view to
prescribing solutions to current problems, just as scientists offer
the means of mastering the natural world. Historians who believe
in their subject’s practical functions habitually distance it from the
humanities and place it alongside the social sciences. E.H. Carr
did so in What is History? (1961):

Scientists, social scientists, and historians are all engaged in different
branches of the same study: the study of man and his environment,
of the effects of man on his environment and of his environment
on man. The object of the study is the same: to increase man’s
understanding of, and mastery over, his environment . 42

On this reading, historical re-creation has value primarily as a
preliminary to historical explanation, and the kinds of explana-
tion that matter are those which relate to questions of social,
economic and political concern.

In this discussion I have given pride of place to the practical uses
of history because these continue to arouse such strong resistance
among many professional historians. But the truth is that history
cannot be defined as either a humanity or a social science without
denying a large part of its nature. The mistake that is so often made
is to insist that history be categorized as one to the exclusion of the
other. History is a hybrid discipline which owes its endless fascination
and its complexity to the fact that it straddles the two. If the study of
history is to retain its full vitality, this central ambivalence must con-
tinue to be recognized, whatever the cost in logical coherence. The
study of history ‘for its own sake’ is not mere antiquarianism. Our
human awareness is enhanced by the contemplation of vanished
eras, and historical re-creation will always exercise a hold over the
imagination, offering as it does vicarious experience to writer and
reader alike. At the same time, historians also have a more practical
role to perform, and the history that they teach, whether to students
in schools and colleges or through the media to the wider public,
needs to be informed by an awareness of this role. In this way a
historical education achieves a number of goals at once: it trains the
mind, enlarges the sympathies and provides a much-needed perspec-
tive on some of the most pressing problems of our time.

54

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Marxism and the English Revolution

Marxism, the philosophy of Karl Marx (1818-83), was one of
the most influential political and intellectual movements of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marx held that all human
history can be explained in terms of dialectic, the conflict between
different social classes for control of the main means of economic
production. This produces a succession of stages from feudalism
to capitalism, and from capitalism to a communist society, in
which workers enjoy the benefits of their own labour. The English
Civil Wars (1642-9) were for many years understood essentially
as a conflict for authority between king and Parliament. Marxist
historians working in the twentieth century, notably Christopher
Hill (1912-2003), saw it in much more radical terms, as an attempt
to create a new society on principles of equality and individual
liberty. In this sense it constitutes an English Revolution in the same
way as the later revolutions in France and Russia, as a shift from
aristocratic to bourgeois and even working-class hegemony.

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a fifteenth-century European cultural
and intellectual movement which began in Italy and eventually
spread to France, Germany, the Netherlands and England. It
drew inspiration from new discoveries in the art and writings
of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Artists experimented with
perspective and depth, while sculptors created remarkably lifelike
reproductions of human and animal forms. Renaissance writers
explored Greek philosophy and sought to marry its ideas with
those of Christianity.

Transformation: by peace and by war

In 1948 the white Afrikaaner government of South Africa
imposed a policy of strict racial segregation known as apartheid.
Black African resistance came to centre on the imprisoned
African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela. By the 1980s
South Africa seemed close to civil war, but concessions by the
government of F.W. de Klerk, and especially the release of Nelson
Mandela in 1990, enabled the country to undergo a remarkable
peaceful transition to democracy. In 1994 Nelson Mandela
became the first black President of South Africa.

Nineteenth-century Germany presents a contrasting example.
Germany consisted of a large number of separate states. German

THE USES OF HISTORY

5 5

nationalists wanted to amalgamate them into a single, unified
German empire, but Austria, the largest and most powerful
German state, presented a problem, partly because it had a large
non-German empire of its own, and partly because it had long
dominated Germany and was unlikely to welcome the creation
of a large, independent German state. In the event, in 1871
Germany was united into a single empire under the leadership of
the militaristic north German kingdom of Prussia; Austria and its
empire were excluded.

Further reading

John Tosh, Why History Matters, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Gordon Connell-Smith & Howell A. Lloyd, The Relevance of History,
Heinemann, 1972.

Beverley Southgate, Why Bother With History f Ancient, Modern and
Postmodern Motivations, Routledge, 2000.

Jeremy Black, Using History, Arnold, 2005.

Michael Howard, The Lessons of History, Oxford University Press, 1989.

Eric Hobsbawm, On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997.

Peter Mandler, History and National Life, Profile, 2002.

Marc Ferro, The Use and Abuse of History, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984.

Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, Verso, 1998.

Margaret Macmillan, The Uses and Abuses of History, Profile, 2009.

Richard E. Neustadt & Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of
History for Decision-Makers, Free Press, 1986.

Stuart Macintyre (ed.), The History Wars, Melbourne University Press,

2001 .

Notes

1 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Hamish
Hamilton, 1992.

2 A.J.P. Taylor, War by Timetable: How the First World War Began,
Macdonald, 1969, p. 45; Richard Cobb, A Second Identity, Oxford
University press, 1969, p. 47.

56

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

3 George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern
Masculinity, Oxford University Press, 1996, ch. 8.

4 Interview with N.Z. Davis in Henry Abelove et al. (eds), Visions of
History, Manchester University Press, 1984, pp. 114-15.

5 Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century
England, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974, p. 284.

6 Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations,
Cambridge, 1977, p. 181.

7 Pat Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present
Issues, Oxford University Press, 2000.

8 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas’,
History & Theory, VIII, 1969, p. 53.

9 James Joll, Europe Since 1870, Penguin, 1976, p. xii.

10 Eric Hobsbawm, On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997, p. 27.

11 Gordon Connell-Smith and Howell A. Lloyd, The Relevance of
History, Heinemann, 1972, pp. 29-31, 123.

12 W.S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, 4 vols, Harrap,
1933-8; Roy Jenkins, Asquith, Collins, 1964.

13 Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance
Statesman (Ricordi), Harper & Row, 1965, p. 69.

14 See, for example, Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking
in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, Free Press,

1986; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Unwin
Hyman, 1988.

15 David H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1971, ch. 9.

16 Hobsbawm, On History, pp. 29, 233.

17 E.H. Carr, What is History? 2nd edn, Penguin, 1987, p. 69.

18 These assumptions underpinned Donald Denoon, Southern Africa
Since 1800, Longman, 1972, and many other texts of the time.

19 Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian
England, 1850-1895, Princeton, 1989.

20 Michael Anderson, ‘The relevance of family history’, in Chris Harris
(ed.), The Sociology of the Family, Keele, 1980.

21 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, Yale
University Press, 1992; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. II:
Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, Verso, 1998, pp. 41-73.

22 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, 1983.

23 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double
Consciousness, Verso, 1993.

24 Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern

THE USES OF HISTORY

57

England, Cambridge University Press, 1993; Clare Midgley, Women
Against Slavery, Routledge, 1992.

25 William Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, Peter Davies, 1926, p. 176.

26 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home
in Victorian England, Yale University Press, 1999.

27 For an introductory selection, see P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault
Reader, Pantheon, 1984.

28 Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays,
Methuen, 1962, p. 165.

29 G.R. Elton, ‘Second thoughts on history at the universities’, History,
LIV, 1969, p. 66. See also his The Practice of History, Fontana, 1969,

pp. 66-8.

30 V.H. Galbraith, in R.C.K. Ensor et al. (eds), Why We Study History,
Historical Association, 1944, p. 7; see also his An Introduction to the
Study of History, C.A. Watts, 1964, pp. 59-61.

31 Peter Mandler, History and National Fife, Profile, 2002, p. 10.

32 Richard Cobb, A Second Identity, Oxford University Press, 1969,
p. 47.

33 Jeff Guy, The Destruction of the Zulu Kingdom, Longman, 1979.

34 David Cannadine, ‘British history: past, present - and future?’, Past
& Present, cxvi, 1987, p. 180.

35 See, for example, G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials, Cambridge
University Press, 1990, pp. 84-7.

36 See W.G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape, Penguin,
1970.

37 Harold James, in Pat Hudson (ed.), Living Economic and Social
History, Economic History Society, 2001, p. 166.

38 Geoffrey Barraclough, History in a Changing World, Blackwell, 1955,
pp. 24-5.

39 Richard Evans, Telling Lies: History, Holocaust, and the David
Irving Trial, Basic Books, 2001.

40 www.historyandpolicy.org

41 Richard Cobb, A Sense of Place, Duckworth, 1975, p. 4.

42 Carr, What is History ? p. 86.

CHAPTER THREE

Mapping the field

Much of the history students encounter is concerned with political
events, but that is far from the limit of the historian’s interest
or concerns. Historians have greatly widened the range of their
studies since the heyday of Victorian constitutional history. Today
no aspect of human thought and activity is excluded from the
scope of historical study. Economy, society, mentality and culture
all have their place in the curriculum. This chapter describes and
classifies this richness.

early modern

Usually taken to mean
the period from the
Renaissance to the French
and Industrial Revolutions,
equating roughly to
the Tudor, Stuart and
Hanoverian periods in
English history.

W hether history is studied for practical purposes or on
account of its intrinsic value as a cultural resource, it is
almost impossible to set limits on its scope. The implications are
truly formidable if history is defined as the study of the entire past
of humankind; they are only marginally less so if we limit this
definition to the periods and places for which there is a written
record. All history has some claim on our attention, but making
sense of history demands that we categorize the very wide range
of approaches that can be taken in studying the past. Nearly all
historians accept a defining label; even those who call themselves
world historians or global historians are not claiming omnis-
cience, but are foregrounding one perspective at the expense of a
great many others. Several labelling schemes are in use. Historians
have for a long time identified themselves by the period they
study, as for example, ‘medievalists’, ‘early modernists’ or ‘con-
temporary historians’, and in practice the period for which they
have an acknowledged expertise is likely to be limited still further
- to a century perhaps in the case of a medievalist, and often no
more than a decade in the case of a specialist in the nineteenth

MAPPING THE FIELD

59

or twentieth centuries. Then there is specialization by locality.
Particular periods are generally studied in relation to one country
or region only. The specialist in the English Revolution of the
seventeenth century, for example, would naturally be interested
in those countries of Western Europe which, like France and the
Netherlands, experienced their own political crises at the same
time, but his or her knowledge of them would probably not be
founded on anything more than a reading of the secondary litera-
ture - and regrettably in many cases only the literature in English
and one other European language. Those historians with first-
hand research experience in more than one country or period are
a small minority (see below, pp. 160 ).

In addition to the specialization of time and place, there is also
the specialization of theme. Whereas modern historical scholar-
ship achieves a more or less steady output for all the periods
and countries that are reasonably well documented, its choice of
theme is much more subject to changing fashion. The claims of
social relevance, the development of new techniques of research,
and the theoretical insights of other disciplines all influence his-
torians in determining which aspects of the past should enjoy
research priority. For these reasons, choice of theme gives a much
clearer indication of the actual content of historical enquiry than
does choice of period or country. It is also much the best way of
conveying the richness of contemporary scholarship, since the
range of historical themes has greatly expanded over the past fifty
years. I begin with what might be regarded as the senior branch
of historical study, though it is no longer the dominant one.

I

Political history

Political history is conventionally defined as the study of all those
aspects of the past that have to do with the formal organization
of power in society, which for the majority of human societies
in recorded history means the state. It includes the institutional
organization of the state, the competition of factions and parties
for control over the state, the policies enforced by the state, and
the relations between states. To many people, the scope of history
would appear to be exhausted by these topics, mainly because
that was what they had studied in school. In recent years both the

60

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

lay readership

Readers outside the
academic historical
profession.

Arthur Young
(1741-1820)

English writer and
agriculturalist, and author
of detailed accounts
of tours through the
agricultural areas of
England, Ireland and
France. He visited France
each year between
1787 and 1790, and
his accounts therefore
provide historians with
an invaluable account,
from an intelligent and
informed outside observer,
of the state of French rural
society on the eve of the
Revolution.

National Curriculum and television programmes have reflected
a broader range of interest. But political history has not lost its
appeal, and it capitalizes on its central place in historical scholar-
ship since ancient times.

The reasons for this traditional dominance are clear enough.
Historically the state itself has been much more directly involved
in the writing of history than with any other literary activity. On
the one hand, those who exercised political power looked to the
past for guidance as to how best to achieve their ends. At the same
time, political elites had an interest in promoting for public con-
sumption a version of history that legitimized their own position
in the body politic, either by emphasizing their past achievements,
or by demonstrating the antiquity of the constitution under which
they held office. Moreover, political history has always found an
avid lay readership. The rise and fall of statesmen and of nations
or empires lends itself to dramatic treatment in the grand manner.
Political power is intoxicating, and for those who cannot exercise
it themselves, the next best thing is to enjoy it vicariously in the
pages of a gifted writer. The consequences of pandering to this
popular preference have long been deplored. Arthur Young, the
English agronomist famous for his descriptions of the French
countryside on the eve of the Revolution, was blunt:

Voltaire (1694-1778)

Francois Marie Arouet
de Voltaire, one of the
most celebrated writers
of the French eighteenth-
century Enlightenment.
Voltaire was best known
for his witty satires on
contemporary manners
and ideas, but he also
wrote historical works,
including studies of Louis
XIV and of the Swedish
King Charles XII, and a
treatise on Newtonian
physics.

faction

A political grouping,
usually held together by
patronage or personal,
rather than party, loyalty.

To a mind that has the least turn after philosophical inquiry, reading
modern history is generally the most tormenting employment that
a man can have: one is plagued with the actions of a detestable set
of men called conquerors, heroes, and great generals; and we wade
through pages loaded with military details; but when you want to
know the progress of agriculture, or commerce, and industry, their
effect in different ages and nations on each other ... all is a blank . 1

Political history in turbulent times

In fact, during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a
‘philosophical’ turn of mind was rather more evident than Young
allowed for. Voltaire’s historical works ranged over the whole field
of culture and society, and even Gibbon did not confine himself
to the dynastic and military fortunes of the Roman Empire. But
the nineteenth-century revolution in historical studies greatly rein-
forced the traditional preoccupation with statecraft, faction and
war. German historicism was closely associated with a school of
political thought, best represented by Hegel, which endowed the

MAPPING THE FIELD

61

concept of the state with a moral and spiritual force beyond the
material interests of its subjects; it followed that the state was
the main agent of historical change. Equally, the nationalism that
inspired so much historical writing at this time led to an emphasis
on the competition between the great powers and the struggles
of submerged nationalities for political self-determination. Few
historians would have quarrelled with Ranke when he wrote, ‘the
spirit of modern times . . . operates only by political means’. 2 The
Victorian historian, E.A. Freeman, put it more simply: ‘History
is past politics’. 3 The new university professors in the Rankean
mould were essentially political historians.

What should political history be about?

Yet, as the definition given earlier would suggest, political history
can mean different things, and its content has been almost as
varied and as subject to fashion as any other branch of history.
Ranke himself was chiefly interested in how the great powers of
Europe had acquired their strongly individual characters during
the period between the Renaissance and the French Revolution.
He looked for explanations less to the internal evolution of those
states than to the unending struggle for power between them. One
of Ranke’s legacies, therefore, was a highly professional approach
to the study of foreign policy. Diplomatic history has been a
staple pursuit of the profession ever since, its appeal periodically
reinforced as historians have responded to a public demand to
understand the origins of the latest war. In the aftermath of the
First World War especially, much of this work verged on nation-
alist propaganda and it was too heavily dependent on the archives
of a single country. At times, diplomatic history has been reduced
to scarcely more than a record of what one diplomat or foreign
minister said to another, with little awareness of the wider influ-
ences that so often shape foreign policy - financial and military
factors, the influence of public opinion, and so on. Nowadays
the best diplomatic history deals with international relations in
the most comprehensive sense, rather than the diplomacy of a
particular nation. In her book Peacemakers (2001) Margaret
Macmillan provides a masterly account of the six months of
negotiation that led up to the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Her
account revolves around the intense negotiations between the three
key players: Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Clemenceau

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

62

The 'Big Four' at the
Paris Peace Conference,
1919: seated left to
right: Orlando (Italy),

Lloyd George (Britain),
Clemenceau (France) and
Woodrow Wilson (United
States). Most of the
business of the conference
was settled in meetings
between them. They
were subject to incessant
lobbying by the many
other powers represented
at the conference.

(Getty Images/Time & Life
Pictures)

of France, and Lloyd George of Britain. But Macmillan shows
how their decisions were conditioned not only by the disposition
of forces at the end of the war, but by the strength of popular
feeling in their respective countries.

Many of Ranke’s contemporaries and followers emphasized
instead the internal evolution of the European nation-states, and
constitutional history was largely their creation. This emphasis was
most pronounced in Britain, where history became an academically
respectable subject during the 1860s and 1870s almost entirely
on the strength of constitutional history. Its central theme was of
course the evolution of Parliament, considered by the Victorians to
be England’s most priceless contribution to civilization, and thus the
appropriate focus for a national history. England’s constitutional
history was seen as a sequence of momentous conflicts of principle,
alternating with periods of gradual change, stretching back to the
early Middle Ages; it was enshrined in a succession of great state
documents (Magna Carta and the like) which required disciplined
textual study. For fifty years after the publication of Stubbs’s three-
volume Constitutional History of England (1873-8), constitutional
history carried the greatest academic prestige in Britain, and major

MAPPING THE FIELD

6 3

revisionist work continues to be done to this day. In the hands of
Stubbs’s followers - most of them medievalists, as he was - the
subject was diversified to encompass two closely related special-
isms: the history of law and administrative history. Legal history
attracts relatively little interest today, but administrative history
shows every sign of enjoying a new lease of life as historians seek
to interpret the massive increase in the functions and personnel of
government that has taken place in all Western societies during the
last century.

The fine grain of politics

It would be very misleading, however, to suggest that the practice
of political history remains wedded to the categories marked out
in the nineteenth century. In Britain especially, reaction against
the traditional forms of political history has turned on the con-
tention that none of them directly confronts what ought to be a
central issue in any study of politics, namely the acquisition and
exercise of political power and the day-to-day management of
political systems. From this perspective, the Stubbs tradition, with
its emphasis on constitutional principles and the formal institu-
tions of government, seems unhelpful.

The most influential spokesman for this reaction was L.B.
Namier, whose writings on eighteenth-century England marked
something of a turning point. What interested Namier was not
primarily the great political issues of the time or the careers of
the leading statesmen, but the composition and recruitment of the
political elite as revealed by the personal case-histories of ordinary
MPs. In The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III
(1929) and later works Namier asked why men sought a seat
in the Commons, how they obtained one, and what considera-
tions guided their political conduct in the House. He cut through
the ideological pretensions with which politicians clothed their
behaviour (aided and abetted by later historians), and neither
their motives nor their methods emerged with much credit. As a
result, most of the accepted picture of eighteenth-century English
politics was demolished - the two-party system, the packing of the
Commons with government placemen, and the assault on the con-
stitution by the young George III. Namier’s method was quickly
taken up by historians working on other periods, and towards the
end of his life he enshrined it in the officially sponsored History

64

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

of Parliament, which will eventually comprise biographies of
everyone who sat in the House of Commons between 1485 and
1901: twenty-eight volumes have so far been published. 4

Such an approach, in which the analysis of motive and
manoeuvre is allowed full play, makes for a fascinating study in
the psychology of political conflict. But it illuminates the surface
only. As soon as it is conceded that politics is not only about per-
sonalities but also about the clash of competing economic interests
and rival ideologies, then the wider society outside the rarified
atmosphere of court or Parliament becomes critically important.
This is self-evident in the case of periods of revolutionary change

One of the most significant ideas to come out of the French Revolution was the concept of the nation as a focus
for group identity, instead of loyalty to a dynastic ruler. Nationalism was often linked to liberalism, although it was
also taken up by illiberal conservatives. Nineteenth-century Europe saw a number of revolutionary nationalist risings,
although Italy and Germany, the two main examples of nineteenth-century states established along nationalist lines,
both owed their existence more to the manoeuvres of statesmen than they did to revolutionaries. The nation-state
was at the heart of President Woodrow Wilson's policy of national self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference
of 1919. (Mary Evans Picture Library)

MAPPING THE FIELD

6 5

when the political system broke down as a result of changes in the
structure of economy or society. In more stable political situations
the dimensions of class and ideology may not be so clearly articu-
lated, but they are present nonetheless, and any analysis of political
trends beyond the short term demands that they be understood.
At the very least, historians have to be aware of the social and
economic background of the political elite and the role of public
opinion. More than any other branch of history, political history
depends for its vitality on a close involvement with its intellectual
neighbours, and particularly with the fields of economic and social
history.

II

History beyond the elite

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that for Ranke’s generation
economic and social history did not exist. By the late nineteenth
century, however, Western Europe and the United States were
emerging from a major economic and social transformation which
historical study as then practised was manifestly incapable of
explaining. Although Marx’s thought has been rigorously applied
to historical research in the West on a large scale only during the
past fifty years (see Chapter 8), his emphasis on the historical
significance of the means of production and of relations between
classes had already gained wide currency among politically lit-
erate people by the early twentieth century. Moreover the effect
of the rise of organized labour and the mass socialist parties was
to push issues of economic and social reform more insistently
on to the centre of the political stage than ever before. Developments
in the early twentieth century pointed in the same general direc-
tion. For many, the First World War dealt a fatal blow to the
ideal of the nation-state, whose rise had been the great theme of
nineteenth-century historiography, while the recurrent slumps
and depressions in the world economy confirmed the need for a
more systematic grasp of economic history.

Around the turn of the century the narrowly political focus of
academic history came under increasing attack from historians
themselves. Manifestos calling for a new and broader approach
were launched in several countries - most self-consciously in
the United States, where they sailed under the flag of the ‘New

historiography

The study of the writing
of history, although the
term is sometimes also
used to denote the range
of historians' writings on a
particular theme.

ee

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Sidney (1859-1947) and
Beatrice (1858-1943)
Webb

British social historians
and reformers, prominent
in the 1910s and 1920s.
They took a leading role in
the socialist Fabian Society
and in the trade union
movement. Convinced of
the importance of social
and economic history,
they published a History
of Trade Unionism and in
1 895 they helped to found
the London School of
Economics.

History’. In Britain the connection between historical study and
current social issues was particularly evident in the careers of
Sidney and Beatrice Webb, social reformers and historians of the
British Labour movement; economic history featured from the
start in the curriculum of the London School of Economics, which
they founded in 1895.

Learning from other disciplines: the Annales
school

It was, however, in France that the implications of broadening his-
tory’s scope were most fully worked out. This was the achievement
of Marc Bloch, a medievalist, and Lucien Febvre, a specialist in
the sixteenth century, whose followers today probably command
greater international prestige in the academic world than any
other school. In 1929 Bloch and Febvre founded a historical
journal called Annales d’histoire sociale et economique, usually
known simply as Annales. 5 In the first issue they demanded of
their colleagues not just a broader approach but an awareness of
what they could learn from other disciplines, especially the social
sciences - economics, sociology, social psychology and geography
(a particularly strong enthusiasm of the Annales historians). While
conceding that the practitioners of these disciplines were prima-
rily concerned with contemporary problems, Bloch and Febvre
maintained that only with their help could historians become
aware of the full range of significant questions that they could put
to their sources. And whereas earlier reformers had called for an
inter-disciplinary method, it was systematically put into practice
by the Annales historians in a formidable corpus of publications,
of which Marc Bloch’s Feudal Society (1940) is probably the best
known outside France. From this basic premise, historians of the
Annales school have continued to broaden and refine the content
and methodology of history, with the result that many of the new
directions that the discipline has taken in the past fifty years owe
much to their contribution. At the same time, the Annales school
heaped considerable scorn on the traditional pursuit of political
narrative - a reaction that was shared by many economic and
social historians in Britain: in R.H. Tawney’s words, politics was
‘the squalid scaffolding of more serious matters’. 6

It is mainly because of the initiatives taken by the Annales histo-
rians and their contemporaries that the range of history writing is

MAPPING THE FIELD

67

today so vast. The vitality of economic, social and cultural history
is testimony to those efforts. Meanwhile new specialisms continue
to be added, like global history, environmental history, the history
of the body and the history of the book, and nothing seems to
be abandoned. An inventory of what historians do can easily
read like a dizzying catalogue in which all coherence is lost. The
confusion is compounded when we recognize that work in one
area may be divided by theoretical approaches, and these same
theories may be found in other areas (Marxism being an obvious
example). In this chapter I pursue the metaphor of ‘field’ by taking
three different cross-sections; each is composed of paired oppo-
sites. Together they capture something of the range of historical
study, and they provide a grid on which any individual historical
work can be placed. The first cross-section contrasts the individual
with society or the mass of the people. The second contrasts the
material world with the mental or cultural aspects of experience.
And the third juxtaposes the local with the global, reflecting the
very different spatial frames employed by historians.

Ill

Biography

The common factor behind the new histories that came to the fore
during the twentieth century was that they were about ‘society’.
The traditional conventions of academic history stood condemned
for their concern with small elites and with individuals - the
makers of foreign policy, the statesmen who promoted or resisted
constitutional change, and the leaders of revolutionary move-
ments. Yet such figures continued to attract both academic study
and a popular readership. This human curiosity has been indulged
by historians in the form of biography for as long as history has
been written. It has, however, often been overlaid by intentions
that are inconsistent with a strict regard for historical truth.
During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance many biographies
were frankly didactic, designed to present the subject as a model
of Christian conduct or public virtue. In Victorian times the char-
acteristic form of biography was commemorative: for the heirs
and admirers of a public figure the most fitting memorial was a
large-scale ‘Life’, based almost exclusively on the subject’s own
papers (many of them carefully preserved for this very purpose)

didactic

With an overtly
educational purpose.

68

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

warts-and-all

Honest, showing the bad
points as well as the good.
The term comes from a
portrait of Oliver Cromwell
by the painter Sir Peter
Lely. Cromwell, who had
one or two warts on his
face, told Lely he did not
want a falsely flattering
portrait, but wanted to be
painted 'warts and all'.

Lytton Strachey
( 1880 - 1932 )

British writer and member
of the famous group of
literary figures known
from the area of London
where many of them
lived as the Bloomsbury
group. Strachey's Eminent
Victorians (1 91 8) shocked
many readers by taking
a satirical, sarcastic
approach to four revered
figures from the previous
century, including Florence
Nightingale and General
Gordon.

and so taking the subject at his or her own valuation. Figures
in the more distant past were treated hardly less reverently.
Honest, ‘warts-and-all’ biography was practised by only a few
brave spirits. The Victorian reader of biographies was therefore
confronted by a gallery of worthies, whose role was to sustain a
respect for the nation’s political and intellectual elite.

For historians, the essential requirement in a biography is that
it understands the subject in his or her historical context. It must
be written by someone who is not merely well grounded in the
period in question but who has examined all the major collections
of papers that have a bearing on the subject’s life - including those
of adversaries and subordinates as well as friends and family. A
historical biography is, in short, a major undertaking. Yet even
biography that meets the requirements of modern scholarship
is not without its critics. Many historians believe that it has no
serious place in historical study. The problem of bias cannot be
lightly disposed of. Although there has been a vogue for debunking
biography ever since Lytton Strachey exposed the human frailties
of his ironically named Eminent Victorians (1918), anyone who
devotes years to the study of one individual - something that
Strachey never did - can hardly escape some identification with
the subject and will inevitably look at the period to some extent
through that person’s eyes. Furthermore, biographical narrative
encourages a simplified, linear interpretation of events. Maurice
Cowling, a leading specialist in modern British political history,
argued that political events can only be understood by showing
how members of the political establishment reacted to one
another. ‘For this purpose’, he wrote:

biography is almost always misleading. Its refraction is partial in
relation to the [political] system. It abstracts a man whose public
action should not be abstracted. It implies linear connections between
one situation and the next. In fact connections were not linear. The
system was a circular relationship: a shift in one element changed the
position of all the others in relation to the rest . 7

It is hard to deny that, with the best will in the world, biog-
raphy nearly always entails some distortion, but there are
good grounds for not dismissing it. First, Cowling’s objection
carries much less weight in the case of political systems where
power is concentrated in one man. Ian Kershaw, author of
the most substantial biography of Hitler, has recounted how
reluctant he was initially to attempt the task, since in his

MAPPING THE FIELD

69

previous work he had focused on the structure of Nazi power
in German society. But he came to realize that a structural
approach required ‘increased reflection on the man who was
the indispensable fulcrum and inspiration of what took place,
Hitler himself ’. 8 Second, at the other extreme, biographies of
people who were in no way outstanding can sometimes, if the
documentation is rich enough, illuminate an otherwise obscure
aspect of the past. Linda Colley has written the life of an
obscure eighteenth-century woman called Elizabeth March.
Because her experiences included capture in Morocco and mar-
riage in India, as well as visits to many far-flung ports, the
narrative sheds light on a global maritime world that featured
trade, migration, and slavery; the book is ‘a biography that
crosses boundaries ’. 9

Lastly, and perhaps most important of all, biography is indis-
pensable to the understanding of motive and intention. There is
much dispute among historians as to how prominently matters
of motive - as distinct from economic and social forces - should
feature in historical explanation, and they certainly receive less
emphasis now than they did in the nineteenth century; but plainly
the motives of individuals have some part to play in explaining
historical events. Once this much is conceded, the relevance of
biography is obvious. The actions of an individual can be fully
understood only in the light of his or her emotional make-up, tem-
perament and prejudices. Of course in even the best documented
lives a great deal remains a matter of conjecture: the writings of
public figures especially are often coloured by self-deception as
well as deliberate calculation. But the biographer who has studied
the development of his or her subject from childhood to maturity
is much more likely to make the right inferences. It is for this
reason that during the present century biographers have increas-
ingly stressed the private or inner lives of their subjects as well
as their public careers. From this perspective the personal devel-
opment of important individuals in the past is a valid subject of
historical enquiry in its own right.

IV

70

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

What is social history?

philanthropy

Charitable work.

G.M. Trevelyan
( 1876 - 1962 )

George Macaulay
Trevelyan, British historian
and great-nephew of
the celebrated historian
Thomas Babington
Macaulay. A prolific writer,
he is best known for his
popular English Social
History, which reflected
a wartime regret for the
passing of a more stable
society.

No branch of history proclaims its indifference to the individual
more clearly than social history. That label always indicates a
focus on society as a whole - even if only a small fragment has
actually been investigated. In fact the full ambition of social
history was not immediately apparent. There was, first, the
history of social problems such as poverty, ignorance, insanity
and disease. Historians focused less on the experience of people
afflicted by these conditions than on the ‘problem’ that they posed
to society as a whole; they studied the reforming efforts of private
philanthropy, as seen in charitable institutions such as schools,
orphanages and hospitals, and the increasingly effective interven-
tion of the state in the social field from the mid-nineteenth century
onwards. The limitations of this genre of social history can be
illustrated in the case of Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt’s
two-volume study, Children in English Society (1969, 1973); they
documented in detail the achievements of organized charity and
government concern over a period of four hundred years, but
the recipients of all this care and attention are only occasionally
heard, while children who were not in need are entirely absent
from their account.

Social history meant, second, the history of everyday life in
the home, the workplace and the community. As G.M. Trevelyan
put it, ‘Social history might be defined negatively as the history
of a people with the politics left out’. 10 His English Social Elistory
(1944), for long a standard work, took little account of economics
either, and much of it reads like a catch-all for the miscellaneous
topics that did not fit into his earlier (and largely political) Elistory
of England (1926); there is a great deal of descriptive detail, but
little coherence of theme. Much of this kind of writing has an
elegiac tone: a regret for the passing of the pre-industrial order
when everyday life was on a human scale and geared to natural
rhythms, and a revulsion from the anomie and ugliness of modern
urban living.

elegiac

Lyrical, poetic evocation of
times past.

Labour history and history from below

Lastly, there was the history of the common people, or working
classes, who were almost entirely absent from political history.

MAPPING THE FIELD

71

In Britain this kind of social history was from the end of
the nineteenth century dominated by historians sympathetic to
the labour movement. Although often passionately committed
to the workers’ cause, their writings were at this stage hardly
affected by Marxist influence. Their main concern was to furnish
the British labour movement with a collective historical identity,
and they sought it not through a new theoretical framework (for
which Marxism was of course well suited), but in the historical
experience of the working class itself during the preceding century
- the material and social deprivation, the tradition of self-help,
and the struggles for improved wages and conditions of employ-
ment. For G.D.H. Cole, the leading British labour historian during
the 1930s and 1940s, nothing seemed more important than that
‘as the working class grows towards the full exercise of power, it
should look back as well as forward, and shape its policy in the
light of its own historic experience’. 11 Labour history tended to
live in a world of its own, with only a limited impact on those not
involved in the labour movement.

This tradition of social history was revived and expanded
during the 1960s under the banner of history from below. But
whereas labour history was characterized by a strong institu-
tional bias, history from below concentrates on the unorganized
and the marginal who have been least visible in the historical
record. Seeing history from the bottom up does not just mean
recreating the rhythms of everyday life. It means seeing the past
from the point of view of ordinary people and identifying with
their politics. Above all, history from below contests the pas-
sivity to which ordinary people have been consigned by so many
historians. Popular agency and resistance are its hallmarks. An
early exponent of this approach was George Rude, who studied
the urban crowd in both eighteenth-century London and revolu-
tionary Paris; he rejected the use of the word ‘mob’, and instead
reconstructed the motives and methods of those who took to the
streets to voice their grievances. His study of the Gordon Riots of
1780, when the government lost control of the streets of London
for an entire week, is a classic of its kind. 12 Rude’s agenda was
broadened still further in the 1970s by the History Workshop
movement. Though based at Ruskin, the trade-union-sponsored
college at Oxford, History Workshop quickly extended its range
from organized workers to encompass all groups in society
that stood outside - or ‘below’ - the elites on which traditional

72

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

histories had focused. Women’s history and the history of
immigrant communities soon made their appearance. 13 History
Workshop has been particularly notable in drawing in amateur
and community historians, alongside the left-wing academics who
form its core.

History and social structure

But none of the approaches mentioned so far entirely explains
why social history, for so long the poor relation, now enjoys such
prominence. What happened in the 1960s and 1970s was that its
subject matter was redefined in a much more ambitious manner.
Social history now aspires to offer nothing less than the history of
social structure. The notion of ‘social structure’ is a sociological
abstraction of a conveniently indeterminate kind, which can be -
and has been - clothed in any number of theoretical garbs. But
what it essentially means is the sum of the social relationships
between the many different groups in society. Under the influence
of Marxist thought, class has had the lion’s share of attention, but
it is by no means the only kind of group to be considered: there are
also the cross-cutting ties of age, gender, race and occupation.

Social structure may seem to be a static, timeless concept,
partly because it has been treated in this way in the writings of
many sociologists. But it need not be so, and historians tend natu-
rally to adopt a more dynamic approach. As Keith Wrightson, a
leading social historian of early modern England, puts it:

Society is a process. It is never static. Even its most apparently stable
structures are the expression of an equilibrium between dynamic
forces. For the social historian the most challenging of tasks is that of
recapturing that process, while at the same time discerning long-term
shifts in social organization, in social relations and in the meanings
and evaluations with which social relationships are infused . 14

Against the background of a durable social structure, those indi-
viduals or groups who move up or down are often particularly
significant, and social mobility has been much studied by his-
torians. Beyond a certain point, social mobility is incompatible
with the maintenance of the existing structure, and a new form
of society may emerge, as happened most fundamentally during
the Industrial Revolution. Urbanization, in particular, needs
to be studied not just in its economic aspects, but as a process
of social change, including the assimilation of immigrants, the

MAPPING THE FIELD

73

emergence of new forms of social stratification, the hardening
distinction between work and leisure, and so on; important
work along these lines has been pioneered in America, and urban
history is a significant specialism in Britain too. 15 The analysis of
social structure and social change can have major implications
for economic and political history, and social historians in recent
years have staked out large claims in these areas. The long drawn
out ‘gentry controversy’ was mainly a dispute about the connec-
tion between changing social structure and political conflict in
England during the hundred years before the Civil War. 16 The
origins of the Industrial Revolution are now sought not only in
economic and geographical factors, but in the social structure of
eighteenth-century England - especially the ‘open aristocracy’,
with a two-way flow of men and wealth into and out of its
ranks. 17 At this point, social history begins to approximate to the
‘history of society’ in its broadest sense which, it has been argued,
is its proper domain. 18

Much of the earlier, less ambitious social history is relevant to
this new concern, provided its terms of reference are revised. The
new social historians include many who started within the more
limited horizons of one or other of the established categories.
E.P. Thompson, the best-known social historian during the 1960s
and 1970s, had his roots deep in the labour history tradition, but
in The Making of the English Working Class (1963) he stepped
outside it; the growth of a working-class awareness during the
Industrial Revolution is placed in the widest possible context,
including religion, leisure and popular culture, as well as the
factory system and the origins of trade unionism; and, so far from
politics being ‘left out’, the presence of the state is both constant
and menacing, as an instrument of class control.

As well as being formative in the social history of Britain,
the period covered by Thompson was rich in distinguished indi-
viduals. Thompson’s own last published work was a study of the
visionary painter and poet, William Blake. 19 Historians do not
divide neatly between students of the mass and students of the
individual. Biography and social history may represent sharply
divergent perspectives, but both are needed, and both feature
prominently in contemporary historical practice.

gentry controversy

A long-running argument
in academic circles about
the development of
social change in early
seventeenth-century
England and its bearing on
the origins of the English
Civil War. The argument
was over whether the
lesser landowning class
(the gentry) was 'rising' in
social and economic status
at the expense of the
older landed aristocracy,
or whether the opposite
was true. The argument
raged for many years and
was a staple feature of
undergraduate essays;
however, since it is not
easy to come up with a
clear-cut definition of
'gentry' and 'aristocracy',
or exactly what is meant
by a class 'rising', no
clear conclusion was ever
reached.

E.P. Thompson
( 1924 - 93 )

British Marxist historian.
Thompson was also active
in socialist politics. His
Making of the English
Working Class was the first
attempt to tell the story
of the development of a
distinctive working-class
culture and identity in the
late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

74

V

Economic history

My second pairing contrasts the material and mental worlds. The
one deals with the external requirements of life; the other probes
the internal world of thought and emotion. Both must feature in
a comprehensive recovery of the past. Economic history focuses
on ‘earthly necessities’ - the title of an outstanding economic
history of early modern England. 20 It seeks to reconstruct produc-
tion, exchange and consumption. Such activities are for the most
part a matter of external observation, and in many cases they
can be measured. This approach can be contrasted with one that
seeks to reconstruct mental processes, including formal thought,
religious belief and emotional states. These cannot be measured
or observed, and they call for a considerable degree of empathy
and an ability to tease out the possible meanings of texts and
images.

Economic history was the first specialism to gain recognition
outside political history. By 1914 it had emerged as a sharply
defined area of study in several countries, including Britain. The
relevance of economic history to contemporary problems largely
explains its head-start over other contenders; indeed, in many
universities, especially in America, economic history was studied
not as part of general history, but in conjunction with economics,
a discipline whose own claims to academic respectability had only
just won general recognition by the end of the nineteenth century.
Both in Britain and in the rest of Europe, much of the pioneer
work concerned the economic policies of the state - an approach
that required the minimum adaptation on the part of historians
schooled in political history. But this was clearly an inadequate
base on which to come to grips with the historical phenomenon
of industrialization, which from the start loomed large on the
agenda of economic historians. It resulted in a special emphasis
on Britain, the first country to experience an industrial revolution,
and attracted continental as much as British historians. Their work
was particularly strong on local studies of particular industries,
such as Lancashire cotton textiles or Yorkshire woollens, and it
highlighted individual initiative and technical innovation. A pale
reflection of this approach is still to be seen in those old-fashioned
textbooks which chronicle Britain’s Industrial Revolution as a
sequence of inventions made in the late eighteenth century.

MAPPING THE FIELD

75

The difficult interplay of economic and political
history

In many ways economic history offers about the biggest contrast
to political history that can be imagined. Its chronology is quite
different. It often makes light of differences of political culture
and national tradition, particularly in studies of the modern
global economy. And it gives minimal scope to personality and
motive, the classic preoccupations of historians; instead ‘imper-
sonal’ forces such as inflation or investment tend to hold the
centre of the stage. Furthermore, economic historians delight
in undermining the bedrock assumptions of their non-specialist
colleagues - most provocatively in several works that deny that
Britain experienced an industrial revolution at all. 21 For all these
reasons many political historians would prefer to hold economic
history at arm’s length. But in practice their own agenda has been
influenced by the findings of economic history in very positive
ways. For example, the financial predicament of Tudor govern-
ments - and the political difficulties with Parliament that this
brought in its train - cannot be grasped without an understanding
of the great inflation of the sixteenth century. 22 Similarly, interpre-
tations of the origins of the Boer War, which broke out in 1899
between Britain and the gold-rich Transvaal, have been modified
in the light of precise information about the vicissitudes of the
international gold standard at that time. 23

Enterprise and economic growth

Two trends stand out in current writing on modern economic
history, though they do not define its entire scope. The first one is
business history - the systematic study of individual firms on the
basis of their business records. The source materials are usually
manageable, and firms that allow access to them sometimes foot
the bill for research as well. Whether or not the historian identi-
fies with the values of capitalist entrepreneurship, what comes out
best from these studies is a keener understanding of the mecha-
nisms of economic expansion, often at a critical juncture in the
history of an industry. The implications of research in business
history can be wider still. How far the beginning of Britain’s eco-
nomic decline in the period 1870-1914 was caused by a failure
of entrepreneurship is a major issue on which business historians
have much to contribute.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

76

Business history may be regarded as economic history on the
ground. The second approach, by contrast, seeks to explain the
dynamics of growth or decline for an entire economy. This is quite
simply the biggest issue in economics today, both for professional
economists and for the lay public; and since it has been present in
a recognizably modern form since the onset of industrialization
200 years ago, it is hardly surprising that historians should be
interested too. But in seeking to contribute to a wider debate they
have been compelled to sharpen their analytical tools. The older
economic histories such as J.H. Clapham’s Economic History
of Modern Britain (1926-38) were essentially descriptive: they
reconstructed the economic life of a particular period, sometimes
in vivid detail, but in explaining how one phase gave way to the
next they showed little interest in the actual mechanisms of eco-
nomic change. The current debates are very largely about those
mechanisms, and they are conducted in the context of the highly
sophisticated theoretical work on growth that economists have
been carrying out since the 1950s. If historians are to do justice to
their material in this area, they have to be much more versed in the
competing theoretical explanations than they used to be; and since
the testing of these theories depends on the accurate measurement
of indices of growth, historians must also become quantifiers. In
this field the breaking down of those inter-disciplinary barriers
which the Annales school called for half a century ago has been
more complete than in any other.

VI

Getting into the mind of the past

Economic history, with its emphasis on externally observed
behaviour, can be contrasted with the study of intellectual,
emotional and psychological states. It is one thing to categorize
people according to their place in a given structure by indicating
their occupation, status and wealth. It is quite another to enter
into their assumptions and attitudes, to see them as ‘sentient
reflecting beings’. 24 This approach includes themes as varied as
political thought, religion and mass psychology. They have never
been brought together under a single label, but what they have
in common is a concern with mental process. Individual and
collective behaviour still count, but as a basis for making
inferences about mentality or belief.

MAPPING THE FIELD

77

Given the political orientation of historical scholarship as it
matured during the nineteenth century, it comes as no surprise
that the history of political thought has the longest pedigree.
The works of writers like Plato, Machiavelli and Hobbes were
seen as building blocks in a single Western tradition. Today,
however, scholars place much more emphasis on understanding
these thinkers in their historical context - forming their ideas in
response to the events unfolding around them, restricted by the
cultural resources available to them. A much keener awareness is
also shown of the fact that the intellectual landscape of a period
is not primarily composed of the handful of great works that have
inspired posterity; almost by definition, these were inaccessible
to all but a few. The common wisdom of the day against which
the great names were judged (and in many instances condemned)
was what contemporaries had retained, often selectively and
incoherently, from earlier traditions of thought. For the political
historian especially, what counts is the set of ideas within which
people with no claims to intellectual originality operated, and
from this perspective the diffusion of new ideas through deriva-
tive and ephemeral literature is as important as their genesis in
the mind of a great thinker. The intellectual context of periods
of revolutionary change when ideas are often particularly potent
can be properly understood in no other way. In The Intellectual
Origins of the American Revolution (1967), for example, Bernard
Bailyn reconstructed the political culture of ordinary Americans
from 400 or so pamphlets bearing on the Anglo-American conflict
which were published in the thirteen colonies between 1750 and
1776. His research revealed the influence of not only the New
England Puritan tradition and the thought of the Enlightenment,
which had long been taken for granted, but also the anti-
authoritarian political thought of the Civil War period in England,
kept alive by English radical pamphleteers of the early eighteenth
century and transmitted across the Atlantic. At this point the
history of ideas enters the market-place, as it were, and becomes
part of the common culture of the day.

The history of religion

Comparable issues are raised by the history of religion. At one
level, this is about the life and writings of great religious leaders
like Martin Luther or Ignatius Loyola. There is also a strong

Martin Luther
( 1 483 - 1 546 )

One of the most influential
figures in the history of
Christianity. His protest
against the authority
of the Pope in 1 517
began the Protestant
Reformation and the split
in the Western Church. His
ideas rapidly spread under
the patronage of rulers in
Germany and elsewhere.

Ignatius Loyola
( 1491 - 1556 )

Founder of the Jesuit
order, based on
spiritual discipline and
missionary work. His
life and achievements
symbolized the resolve
of the Catholic Church to
reinvigorate itself against
the Protestant challenge
(known as the Counter-
Reformation).

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

78

tradition of studying the history of religious institutions, given
the immense power of the Christian Churches throughout most
of their history. But increasingly historians have turned to the
study of popular religion: what did people believe, and how did
their beliefs affect their lives? Conversion is a promising place
to start. In Pulling the Devil’s Kingdom Down (2001) Pamela
Walker examines the Salvation Army in late Victorian Britain.
At the heart of her account is the conversion experiences of
early Salvationists recruited from the poorest neighbourhoods of
London, based on their published biographies and on the War
Cry (the Army’s journal). At the same time, organized religion
has often had to co-exist with unofficial belief systems. In Religion
and the Decline of Magic (1971) Keith Thomas assessed the ebb
and flow of witchcraft, prophecy and astrology during the era
of the Reformation and the English Revolution. ‘I hope’, says
Thomas, ‘to have contributed to our knowledge of the mental
climate of early modern England.’ 25

Some works of history can be clearly allocated to either the
‘material’ or the ‘mental’ camp. An economic study based on
statistics is clearly in a different category from an investigation
of popular magic based on the close reading of court depositions.
But it is important to stress that the material and the mental are
not irreconcilable opposites. They are better regarded as compass
points, around which we can take our bearings when placing a
work of history. In fact some of the most illuminating work places
the material and the mental on a continuum and brings them
together in an integrated analysis. For example, in the case of the
rise of secular thought during the nineteenth century, it is not easy
to distinguish the Churches’ defence of the faith from the securing
of their corporate power. One of the most buoyant strands of
recent economic history is the history of consumption. Modern
historians see shopping as more than the satisfaction of material
wants; by the late nineteenth century middle-class women in the
major cities could experience shopping as romance and glamour,
promoted by the new department stores: Shopping For Pleasure,
as the title of one study aptly puts it. 26

MAPPING THE FIELD

79

VII

World history

Finally, historians deploy a variety of spatial perspectives, ranging
from the local at one extreme to the global at the other. Once
again, the two ends of the spectrum may seem to have little in
common, but both are a reaction against the traditional assump-
tion that history is about the nation-state and nothing else. Both
local history and world history question the nation-state as the
default framework for historical enquiry - the first on the grounds
that it fails to engage with the communities in which ordinary
people lived; the second because it ignores the global networks
that have explained - and constrained - many aspects of the
nation’s development.

At first glance world history sounds like an impossibility.
How could anyone ‘know everything’ about what has happened
on the planet? But world history is not about piling up detail.
More than any other branch of history, it depends on selection,
and the principle of selection is dictated by themes and develop-
ments which have occurred in different parts of the world, and
in some cases all over the world. Examples include the spread of
world religions like Christianity and Islam; the diffusion of New
World food crops; and the rise and fall of global commercial
systems. Two important general points can be made here. First,
world history breaks the identification of academic history with
the history of the West; to employ a global perspective means
taking seriously the history of Third World societies - recognizing
indeed that prior to the late eighteenth century regions like India
and China were at least as powerful and as sophisticated as their
Western counterparts (see Chapter 10). Second, because world
history involves juxtaposing societies and cultures that are usually
studied in separate compartments, it makes considerable use of
the comparative method (discussed more fully in Chapter 6). For
example, to ask why Christianity expanded more rapidly than
Islam in the second half of the nineteenth century (or why the
balance between them was reversed in the second half of the twen-
tieth century) requires a highly demanding comparative approach,
encompassing not just the distinctive features of each faith but the
society in which believers lived.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Globalization

Further precision is added to world history when its subject
matter is defined as the origins of today’s increasingly globalized
world. Globalization refers to the processes whereby our world
has become more integrated and uniform, shrinking both time
and distance, and absorbing production and trade into a single
international capitalist system. National histories can cast only a
fitful light on this theme. Global history signifies an effort to make
sense of our globalizing world (though it can also mean world
history in a broader sense). This is all the more necessary as a
topic for historians because contemporary comment often over-
plays the novelty of globalization, with its single market, rapid
communications and homogenized culture. Like nearly everything
else in the modern world, globalization has evolved over a consid-
erable period. Critical features can be traced back to the period
of British ascendancy in the nineteenth century, to the earlier
maritime empires of the Dutch, the Portuguese and the Spanish,
and even to the ‘world economy’ linking all the lands between
China and Western Europe in the thirteenth century . 27 It is seldom

80

Mercator's map of
the world, 1 587. The
circumnavigation of the
globe enabled European
map-makers to represent
the world as a whole.

But there were still limits
to their knowledge, as
the depiction here of
Antarctica shows. The
eighteenth century was
the watershed in accurate
map-making.

(Bridgeman Art Library/
Private collection)

MAPPING THE FIELD

81

recognized that in some ways global integration is less complete
now than in the past. Historians refer to the late nineteenth
century as the period of ‘high globalization’, when the telegraph
and the steamship had transformed communications, when all the
major currencies were convertible at a fixed rate, and when - a
significant variation from today - there was little impediment to
the free movement of labour across the oceans. 28

One of the most impressive works of global history to date
is C.A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World (2004). His
declared aim is to rescue history from the nation and to bring to
light the multi-centred character of modernity. This means seeing
the world beyond the West not as passive recipients of European
expansion, but as dynamic societies which made their own
adjustments to changing global conditions. Before the nineteenth
century Europe was just one region, along with Japan, China,
Mughal India, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, whose worldwide
links Bayly calls ‘archaic globalization’. 29 Europe’s lead over the
rest of the world became clear in the course of the nineteenth
century, especially in the spheres of technology and production.
But today’s world is also to be explained by creative reactions in
the Third World: in religion, and also (more surprisingly perhaps)
in national identity and social organization. Modernity, in short,
was a truly global phenomenon, requiring a global reach of schol-
arship such as Bayly possesses in full measure.

VIII

Local history

Like world history, local history has until relatively recently been
disdained by the academic profession, but for different reasons.
The greatest interest in a specific locality is felt by those who
live there. Hence, especially in England, local history used to be
dominated by local amateurs who were prepared to work at the
sources without necessarily being able to recognize their wider
significance. Typically they were preoccupied by the doings of the
squire and the parson, to the exclusion of the rest of the popula-
tion. Their publications were dismissed as being of antiquarian
rather than academic interest.

The past fifty years have seen a complete reversal of this
outlook. Local history in England has become a kind of in-depth

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

82

microcosmic social history. During the 1950s the ‘Leicester
school’ of historians, led by W.G. Hoskins, reinterpreted English
local history as the reconstruction of historic communities.
Hoskins laid special emphasis on visual evidence, such as field
patterns, abandoned settlement sites and vernacular architecture.
Other historians pursued every scrap of evidence in order to
follow the fortunes of individual households over a century or
more. Intensive study of this kind assumed a small unit with a
maximum population of 2,000, in other words a village. But
in the best-documented cases the outcome was a study that
brought together every dimension of community life: land use,
economy, social structure and religion. Hoskins was drawn
to pre-industrial villages, which approximated to his nostalgic
pastoralism. But the method is equally valuable as a means of
investigating the human realities of social change. The Making
of an Industrial Society by David Levine and Keith Wrightson
shows how the Tyneside village of Whickham adapted to the
requirements of coal-mining during the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. 30

Microhistory and total history

In community studies knowing the names does not necessarily
mean knowing the people: family size, occupation and church
membership often do little more than enable us to categorize the
inhabitants of a village. But in exceptional cases the surviving
sources bring individuals to life, allowing us the illusion of a
direct encounter, like in a novel. Work of this kind is usually
known as microhistory - a term coined by the Italian scholars
who pioneered it in the 1970s. 31 The most celebrated example is
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s account of life in fourteenth-century
Montaillou. Drawing mainly from the records of the Inquisition,
Ladurie was able to reconstruct the everyday life of the peasants
of Montaillou - their social relationships, their religious and
magical observances, and not just their attitudes to sex but much
of their actual sex life. We are able to follow individuals through
the book, notably the parish priest, Pierre Clergue, whose ready
access to people’s homes enabled him to engage in many extra-
marital liaisons. This is a ‘microhistory’ in the sense that it fills out
in small-scale and human detail some of the social and cultural
features that are otherwise known only as generalizations. 32

MAPPING THE FIELD

83

Local history not only breathes life into abstractions; it can also
bring together on a single canvas the varied themes that are usually
treated separately by specialists. The proliferation of approaches
described in this chapter presents a major problem of integration:
how can we see a society in the round if historians give us only
partial perspectives on economy or religion? Focusing on a single
community of a few hundred people enables the researcher not
only to investigate every dimension of life, but to see how they
were linked together as a whole experience. The many local histo-
ries that have travelled some way along this road have acted as a
powerful solvent of the rigidities to which conventional specialists
working on a larger canvas are so prone. For political historians
particularly, local history serves as a reminder that their subject
is about not only the central institutions of the state, but also the
assertion of authority over ordinary people. As W.G. Floskins put
it, ‘The local historian is in a way like the old-fashioned G.P. of
English medical history, now a fading memory confined to the
more elderly among us, who treated Man as a whole’. 33 This has
important implications for the goal of historians to integrate their
specialist studies into a fully integrated picture of the past. On a
grand scale it is an impossible task. But it is possible within the
confines of town or village. Paradoxically, ‘total history’ turns out
to mean local history. That explains its high academic standing
today.

IX

In many ways the local historian and the global historian stand
further away from each other than any of the other specialists dis-
cussed in this chapter; but even here there are illuminating links to
be made. It is a mistake to suppose that the village community was
ever completely isolated. Economic and cultural influences always
impinged from the outside. Perhaps the most striking demonstra-
tion of the links between the local and global is Donald Wright’s
book, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa (2004). The
subject is the tiny West African kingdom of Niumi at the mouth of
the Gambia river. Wright analyses the impact of its global links from
the trans-Saharan trade of the late medieval era up to the drive for
development in independent Gambia. His study demonstrates that
it makes little sense for historians or anthropologists to study small
communities as if they were cut off from the outside world.

84

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Every work of history strikes some kind of balance between
the individual and society, between the material and the mental,
and between the local and the global. Where that balance is struck
is the choice of the researcher. Academic fashion often influences
the outcome since historians are keen to ride the crest of a wave,
or better still to anticipate it. It is also more common today for
researchers to be recruited into teams with a collective brief and
research funding to match. Even so, the range of options is still
extraordinarily wide, reflecting the fact that history knows no
disciplinary bounds. More than ever before, the generic occu-
pational label gives little clue as to what an individual historian
actually does. The range of possibilities is sometimes experienced
as overwhelming. It is also what makes the study of history such a
stimulating pursuit.

Hegelian dialectic

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was the leading
German philosopher of the early nineteenth century. He argued
that human events in history were determined by the operation
of dialectic - the clash of opposing forces or ideas out of which
emerged a synthesis, which would in its turn be challenged by an
opposing antithesis. Hegel believed that this process would lead
eventually to a state of harmony based upon Christian ethics and
morality. Karl Marx, who was much influenced by Hegel, ‘turned
him on his head’ by divorcing Hegel’s ideas from their Christian
framework and applying the dialectic model to the clash of class
interests throughout history, leading ultimately to the control of
economy and society by the working class.

Tudor inflation

Across sixteenth-century Europe there developed a steady and
alarming rise in prices which caused considerable hardship. The
reasons for the inflation were not clear to contemporaries, who
blamed anything from human greed to the enclosure of common
land to graze sheep. The English government of Edward VI
responded by debasing the coinage in order to put more money
into circulation, but this simply led people to put their prices
up still higher. Historians long thought the inflation was caused
by the influx of gold and silver bullion from the Americas,
but nowadays it is thought to be a result of the huge rise in
population during the period.

MAPPING THE FIELD

85

Further reading

David Cannadine (ed.), What is History Today?, Palgrave, 2003.

Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Polity Press,
1991.

Anna Green & Kathleen Troup (eds), The Houses of History: A Critical
Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory, Manchester
University Press, 1999.

Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited, Routledge, 1987.

Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School
1929-89, Polity Press, 1990.

Fernand Braudel, On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980.

Carlo M. Cipolla, Between History and Economics: An Introduction to
Economic History, Blackwell, 1991.

Miles Fairburn, Social History: Problems, Strategies and Methods,
Routledge, 1999.

Kate Tiller, English Local History: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Sutton,

2002 .

Benedikt Stuchtey & Eckhardt Fuchs (eds), Writing World History,
1800-2000, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Notes

1 Arthur Young writing from Florence in 1789, quoted in J.R. Hale (ed.),
The Evolution of British Historiography, Macmillan, 1967, p. 35.

2 Leopold von Ranke, History of Servia, 1828, quoted in Theodore H.
von Laue, Leopold Ranke: The Formative Years, Princeton University
Press, 1950, p. 56.

3 Edward A. Freeman, The Methods of Historical Study, Macmillan,
1886, p. 44.

4 Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, The House of Commons 1754-
1790, 3 vols, HMSO, 1964, marked the first stage in this massive
enterprise.

5 The journal was renamed Annales: economies, societes, civilisations in
1946.

6 R.H. Tawney, obituary of George Unwin (1925), quoted in N.B.

Harte (ed.), The Study of Economic History, Frank Cass, 1971,
p. xxvi.

7 Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Labour, 1920-1924, Cambridge
University Press, 1971, p. 6.

86

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

8 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, vol I: Hubris, Allen Lane, 1998, p. xii.

9 Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World
History, Harper, 2007, p. xix.

10 G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History, Longman, 1944, p. vii. An
almost identical definition is given in G.J. Renier, History: Its Purpose
and Method, Allen & Unwin, 1950, p. 72.

11 G.D.H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working-Class
Movement, 1789-1947 , Allen & Unwin, 1948, pp. v-vi.

12 George Rude, Paris and London in the 18th Century, Fontana, 1970,
pp. 268-92.

13 For a representative collection of work done under the auspices
of History Workshop in its early years, see Raphael Samuel (ed.),
People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge, 1981.

14 Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680, Hutchinson, 1982,

p. 12.

15 See Stephan Thernstrom, ‘Reflections on the new urban history’,
Daedalus, C, 1971, pp. 359-75. For British developments, see H.J.
Dyos, Exploring the Urban Past, Cambridge University Press, 1982.

16 For a review of the literature, see Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the
English Revolution, 1529-1642, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

17 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969.

18 E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘From social history to the history of society’,
Daedalus, C, 1971, pp. 2CM15.

19 E.P. Thompson, Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the
Moral Law, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

20 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early
Modern Britain, Yale University Press, 2000.

21 R.C. Floud and D. McCloskey (eds), The Economic History of
Britain since 1700, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1981.

22 R.B. Outhwaite, Inflation in Tudor and Early Stuart England, 2nd
edn, Macmillan, 1982.

23 J.J. Van-Helten, ‘Empire and high finance: South Africa and the
international gold standard, 1890-1914 ’, Journal of African History,
XXIII, 1982, pp. 529-48.

24 I have taken this phrase from Margaret Spufford, Contrasting
Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries, Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. xxiii.

25 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1971, p. ix.

26 Erika Rappaport, Shopping For Pleasure: Women in the Making of
London’s West End, Princeton University Press, 2001.

MAPPING THE FIELD

87

27 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: the World
System, A.D. 1250-1350, Oxford University Press, 1989.

28 Martin Daunton, ‘Britain and globalization since 1850, I: Creating
a global order. 1850-1914’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 6th series, XVI, 2006.

29 C.C. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914, Blackwell,
2004, pp. 41-47.

30 David Levine and Keith Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial
Society: Whickham, 1560-1765, Oxford University Press, 1991.

31 See especially Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The
Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1980.

32 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a
French Village, 1294-1324, Penguin, 1976.

33 W.G. Hoskins, English Local History: The Past and the Future,
Leicester University Press, 1966, p. 21.

CHAPTER FOUR

The raw materials

Students rarely work with historical sources in their original state.
Examination papers and textbooks contain short, labelled extracts,
which bear little resemblance to the originals. What sort of sources
are available to the modern historian? How did they come to be
made available, and how might this affect their usefulness? This
chapter gives a fuller idea of the provenance of, and problems
with, the sort of sources historians habitually use.

S uch is the range of motives and the variety of interests that
draw people to the past that history can be said to embrace
the human experience of every place and period. No part of that
past can be dismissed as falling outside the proper domain of
historical knowledge. But how far it can be made the subject of
well-founded research depends on the availability of historical
evidence. Whether the historian’s main concern is with re-creation
or explanation, with the past for its own sake or for the light it
can shed on the present, what he or she can actually achieve is
determined in the first instance by the extent and character of
the surviving sources. Accordingly it is with the sources that any
account of the historian’s work must begin. This chapter describes
the main categories of documentary material, showing how they
came into being, how they have survived down to the present, and
in what form they are available to the scholar.

THE RAW MATERIALS

89

I

Specialist sources and skills

Historical sources encompass every kind of evidence that human
beings have left of their past activities - the written word and
the spoken word, the shape of the landscape and the material
artefact, the fine arts as well as photography and film. Among the
humanities and social sciences history is unique in the variety of
its source materials, each calling for specialist expertise. The mili-
tary historian of the English Civil War can examine the arms and
armour surviving from the seventeenth century and the terrain
over which the battles were fought, as well as the military dis-
patches of each side. A rounded picture of the General Strike of
1926 calls for a study of government and trade union records, the
press and broadcasting, together with the collection of testimonies
from survivors. The reconstruction of a pre-colonial kingdom in
black Africa is likely to depend not only on the excavation of its
capital but also on the contemporary observations of European
or Arab visitors and the oral traditions handed down over many
generations. No single historian can possibly master all these
tools. The more technical of them have become the province of
distinct specialisms. The excavation of ancient sites and the inter-
pretation of the material remains found there is the business of the
archaeologist, assisted these days by the aerial photographer and
the chemical analyst. In the case of the visual arts the equivalent
specialist is the art historian, though there is an increasing overlap
with the discipline of history (considered in Chapter 9).

During the past forty years the range of sources in which his-
torians claim expertise has certainly increased. It now includes
place-names, landscape patterns and - for recent history - film.
Oral testimony is now fully established as a legitimate source for
historians (see Chapter 11). The fact remains, however, that the
study of history has nearly always been based squarely on what
the historian can read in documents or printed material. That
emphasis was confirmed when historical research was placed on
a professional footing during Ranke’s lifetime. For the majority
of historians, research is an activity that goes on in libraries
and archives.

artefact

Any object left over from
the past.

General Strike

A major industrial dispute
that brought virtually
all of Britain's industry
to a halt in May 1926.

The dispute began in the
mining industry but spread
when other trade unions
came out in support of the
miners.

90

medieval Zimbabwe

The medieval kingdom of
Zimbabwe was a major
power in southern Africa
in the thirteenth to
fifteenth centuries. The
impressive stone ruins of
its royal palace at Great
Zimbabwe posed a serious
challenge to those white
settlers who dismissed
indigenous African culture
as intrinsically inferior to
that of Europeans.

Archival holdings are
essential to historical
scholarship. Not only do
historians have to treat
their sources carefully, they
have to remember how it
is that some sources made
their way into the archives
while others did not.

(Getty Images/Time & Life
Pictures)

The written word

The reason is not just academic conservatism. From the High
Middle Ages (c. 1000-1300) onwards, the written word survives
in greater abundance than any other source for Western history.
The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed not only a marked
growth in record-keeping by the state and other corporate bodies
but also the rapid spread of printing, which encouraged literate
production of all kinds and transformed its prospects of survival.
Written sources are usually precise as regards time, place and
authorship, and they reveal the thoughts and actions of individual
men and women as no other source can do. One has only to read
an account of a society for which virtually no written records exist
- for example Iron Age Britain or medieval Zimbabwe - to see how
lacking in human vitality history can be when denied its principal
source material. Moreover, the written word has always served
many different purposes - information, propaganda, personal com-
munication, private reflection and creative release - all of which
may have relevance for the historian. The interpretation of texts
serving a variety of functions from an age whose habits of mind
differed sharply from our own calls for critical abilities of a very

THE RAW MATERIALS

91

high order. Written sources are at the same time the most rewarding
and (in most cases) the most plentiful. Small wonder, then, that
historians seldom look elsewhere.

The use of written materials as the principal historical source is
complicated by the fact that historians communicate their findings
through the same medium. Both in their choice of research topic
and in their finished work, historians are influenced to a greater
or lesser extent by what their predecessors have written, accepting
much of the evidence they uncovered and, rather more selectively,
the interpretations they put upon it. But when we read the work
of a historian we stand at one remove from the original sources
of the period in question - and further away still if that historian
has been content to rely on the writings of other historians. The
first test by which any historical work must be judged is how far
its interpretation of the past is consistent with all the available
evidence; when new sources are discovered or old ones are read
in a new light, even the most prestigious book may end on the
scrapheap. In a real sense the modern discipline of history rests
not on what has been handed down by earlier historians, but on a
constant reassessment of the original sources. It is for this reason
that historians regard the original sources as primary. Everything
that they and their predecessors have written about the past
counts as a secondary source. Most of this book is concerned with
secondary sources - with how historians formulate problems and
reach conclusions, and how we as readers should evaluate their
work. But first it is necessary to examine the raw materials a little
more closely.

Primary and secondary sources

The distinction between primary and secondary sources, funda-
mental though it is to historical research, is rather less clear-cut
than it might appear at first sight, and the precise demarcation
varies among different authorities. By ‘original sources’ is meant
evidence contemporary with the event or thought to which it
refers. But how far should our definition of ‘contemporary’ be
stretched? No one would quibble about a conversation reported
a week or even a month after it took place, but what about the
version of the same episode in an autobiography composed twenty
years later? And how should we categorize an account of a riot
written shortly afterwards, but by someone who was not present

contemporary

Literally 'at the same
time as'. In historical
terminology it usually
refers to events or people
from the period being
studied.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

92

British reactions to the
French Revolution

When the French
Revolution broke out in
1789, opinion in Britain
was initially supportive.
However, it quickly
became implacably
hostile as events in
France descended into
rule by violence and
terror. A small group of
political radicals, however,
remained consistently
supportive of the
Revolution. These two
responses continue to be
mirrored in the attitudes
of British historians of the
period.

medieval chronicles

Medieval chronicles were
written narratives, often
skilfully crafted into a
highly readable form. We
do not know how much
research went into their
writing, though they were
often consulted by later
chroniclers and writers.

Macaulay's History of
England

Although called a History
of England, Macaulay's
work in fact concentrates
almost entirely on the
important constitutional
changes following the
overthrow of King James II
in 1688 and the accession
of the first Hanoverian
king, George I, in 1714.

and relied entirely on hearsay? Although some purists regard the
testimony of anyone who was not an eyewitness as a secondary
source, 1 it makes better sense to apply a broad definition but to
recognize at the same time that some sources are more ‘primary’
than others. The historian will usually prefer those sources that
are closest in time and place to the events in question. But sources
more remote from the action have their own significance. The his-
torian is often as much interested in what contemporaries thought
was happening as in what actually happened: British reactions to
the French Revolution, for example, had a profound influence on
the climate of politics in Britain, and from this point of view the
often garbled reports of events in Paris which circulated in Britain
at the time are an indispensable source. As this example suggests,
to speak of a source as ‘primary’ implies no judgement of its
reliability or freedom from bias. Many primary sources are inac-
curate, muddled, based on hearsay or intended to mislead, and (as
the next chapter will show) it is a vital part of the historian’s work
to scrutinize the source for distortions of this kind.

The distinction between primary and secondary is further
complicated by the fact that sometimes primary and secondary
material appear in the same work. Medieval chronicles usually
began with an account of world history from the Creation to the
life of Christ, based on well-known authorities; but what modern
historians value them most for is the entries that they recorded
year by year concerning current events. Equally, a work can be
primary in one context and secondary in another: Macaulay’s
History of England (1848-55) is a secondary source whose repu-
tation has been much undermined by modern research; but for
anyone studying the political and historical assumptions of the
early Victorian elite, Macaulay’s book, in its day a bestseller, is
a significant primary source. These examples might suggest what
is often assumed, that ‘historical documents’ are the formal,
dignified records of the past. It is true that records of this kind
are more likely to endure, but the term should carry the widest
possible reference. Every day all of us create what are potentially
historical documents - financial accounts, private correspond-
ence, even shopping lists. Whether they actually become historical
documents depends on whether they survive and whether they are
used as primary evidence by scholars of the future.

In order to make sense of the vast mass of surviving primary
sources, the first requirement is some system of classification.

THE RAW MATERIALS

93

Two types are in common use. The first draws a distinction
between the published - which in the modern period has usually
meant printed - and the unpublished or manuscript source. The
second emphasizes instead the authorship of the sources, drawing
a distinction between those produced by governments and those
produced by corporations, associations or private individuals.
Each of these methods lends itself to the precision required by
the cataloguer, and bibliographies published by historians at the
end of their works are normally arranged along these lines. But
the criteria that historians actually apply in the course of their
research, although related to these two types of classification, are
rather less cut and dried. In the historian’s hierarchy of sources
those that carry most weight are the ones that arise directly from
everyday business or social intercourse, leaving open the task of
interpretation. In every recent age men and women have sought
to make sense of their times, and to interpret the pattern of events
through books, broadsheets and newspapers. Such statements
offer valuable insights into the mentality of the age, but for the
historian they are no substitute for the direct, day-to-day evidence
of thought and action provided by the letter, the diary and the
memorandum: these are the ‘records’ of history par excellence.
Historians wish to be as nearly as possible observers of the events
in question; they do not want to deliver themselves into the hands
of a narrator or commentator. The most revealing source is that
which was written with no thought for posterity. Marc Bloch
called this ‘the evidence of witnesses in spite of themselves’; 2 it has
all the fascination of eavesdropping.

II

Narratives and memoirs

We begin, however, with primary sources written for the benefit
of posterity. These tend to be the most accessible because their
survival was seldom left to chance. Often they have a literary
quality that makes them a pleasure to read. They provide a ready-
made chronology, a coherent selection of events, and a strong
sense of period atmosphere. Their drawback is that they recount
only what people found worthy of note about their own age -
which may not be what interests us today. Prior to the Rankean
revolution in the nineteenth century, it was on primary sources of

broadsheets

A form of early newspaper
designed to be pinned up
in a public place.

memorandum

An internal message or
note sent within an office
or institution. Memoranda
from government
offices can give a very
detailed picture of the
development of policy.

Marc Bloch (1886-1944)

French medievalist
historian. He was one
of the founders of the
Annales school, which
sought to link the study
of history with an in-
depth appreciation of
the role of geography
and other disciplines. He
also wrote a perceptive
study of The Historian's
Craft. During the Second
World War he fought in
the French resistance, but
was captured and shot
shortly before the D-Day
landings.

94

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Vincenz of Beauvais,
medieval polyhistorian.
Although medieval
chroniclers did consult
documents and were
sometimes able to speak
with some of the major
figures they wrote about,
their priority was to
provide a lively narrative.
The historical discipline
of measured analysis of
source material was a
much later, nineteenth-
century development,
(akg-images, Londonj

Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

A detailed yearly chronicle
of major events in Anglo-
Saxon England compiled
by monks at different
monasteries and abbeys
and brought together on
the orders of King Alfred
the Great. It was long
thought to be an objective
account of events, but
historians now see it as
heavily slanted in King
Alfred's favour, possibly
on his instructions.

Matthew Paris
(c.1200-c.59)

Monk of St Albans and
author of one of the most
important chronicles of
medieval England. Paris
seems to have spoken
to leading figures in the
course of compiling his
chronicle.

t- fit tn&c Ni t mtt ft
u«t*0ty {jwtuutuc tJttY /wwVtnro' St' &ui
£ nuufb* <*) t frfrfix pc

.WkTYA.-'N,, Vm * faint

this kind that historians tended to rely. For Roman history they
turned to Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius, while medievalists drew
on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the works of men such as
Matthew Paris in the thirteenth century and Jean Froissart in the
fourteenth. Nor do modern historians disparage these narrative
sources. They owe their continuing importance to the fact that
they survive from periods that have left only a limited amount of
record sources. In the Middle Ages most of the early chronicles
were written by monks without personal experience of public
affairs, but increasingly from the twelfth century they were joined
by secular clergy who had served the king in responsible positions
and could to some extent record political history from the inside.
Gerald of Wales was a royal chaplain who became acquainted
with Henry II towards the end of his reign in the 1180s. The
following passage well conveys the restless energy of one of
England’s most remarkable kings:

Henry II, king of England, was a man of reddish, freckled complexion
with a large round head, grey eyes which glowed fiercely and grew
bloodshot in anger, a fiery countenance and a harsh, cracked voice.
His neck was somewhat thrust forward from his shoulders, his chest

THE RAW MATERIALS

95

was broad and square, his arms strong and powerful. His frame was
stocky with a pronounced tendency to corpulence, due rather to
nature than to indulgence, which he tempered by exercise . . .

In times of war, which frequently threatened, he gave himself
scarcely a modicum of quiet to deal with those matters of business
which were left over, and in times of peace he allowed himself
neither tranquility nor repose. He was addicted to the chase beyond
measure; at crack of dawn he was off on horseback, traversing waste
lands, penetrating forests and climbing the mountain-tops, and so he
passed restless days. At evening on his return he was rarely seen to sit
down either before or after supper. After such great and wearisome
exertions he would wear out the whole court by continual standing . 3

Jean Froissart
Cc.1335-c.1404)

French chronicler, he spent
long periods in England
at the court of King
Edward III. His chronicle
covers the early period of
the Hundred Years' War
between England and
France. His early version
was more sympathetic to
the English than his later
accounts.

The autobiography is essentially a modern variant of the chron-
icle, with the personality of the author brought to the front of the
stage. Invented by the self-conscious Italians of the Renaissance, 4
this form is favoured by artists, writers and perhaps most of all by
politicians. The fascination of autobiographies derives from the
fact that they are the recollections of an insider. Indeed they often
provide the only available first-hand account, because in all coun-
tries recent government records are closed to public inspection
(see p. 113); in Britain former Cabinet ministers, when writing
their memoirs, are permitted to consult official papers relating to
their term of office, though they may not cite or quote from them.
But the author’s purpose is less to offer an objective account than
to justify his or her actions in retrospect and to provide evidence
for the defence before the bar of history. Autobiographies may
be very revealing of mentality and values, but as a record of
events they are often inaccurate and selective to the point of dis-
tortion. This was pre-eminently true of Winston Churchill who,
even while he was Prime Minster, intended to write the defini-
tive record of his wartime leadership. Through his voluminous
memoirs, published soon after the Second World War, he suc-
cessfully established his own somewhat self-aggrandizing version
of events. It was many years before the extent of the distortion
became clear to historians. Even today Churchill’s popular image
remains pretty much what he himself planted in the public mind
during and after the war. 5

At the same time it would be a mistake to think of the
published memoir as an upper-class preserve. In Britain by the
mid-nineteenth century it had become a recognized means of
expression for the literate artisan as well. As David Vincent has
shown, autobiographies were written in order to convey the

secular clergy

Priests who do not belong
to a monastic order.

Gerald of Wales
(1146-1223)

Gerald de Barri, Bishop
of St David's and writer
of descriptions of Wales
and Ireland. Frustrated
ambition led him to turn
against his English patrons
and fight for Welsh
independence against King
Edward I.

Henry II (1135-89)

First of the Plantagenet
Kings of England (also
known as Angevins,
from their native Anjou
in France). Henry is best
known for his disastrous
feud with Archbishop
Thomas a Becket, but
he also instituted major
reforms in the legal
system.

96

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Thomas Hardy
( 1752 - 1832 )

Scottish radical. He was
accused and acquitted
of high treason in 1794,
during the wars with
Revolutionary France. Not
to be confused with the
novelist of the same name.

census reports

The census has been held
in Britain at regular ten-
year intervals ever since
1 801 , except for 1 941 ,
when the demands of war
made it impossible. Census
reports include detailed
commentary as well as
statistical tables, which
make them peculiarly
useful to social historians.

royal commissions

A committee of inquiry
set up at the command of
the monarch (i.e. of the
government) to investigate
an issue. Commissions
take evidence from
witnesses and then
produce detailed reports.
Both the transcriptions of
questioning of witnesses
and the reports are usually
published.

humanity of the working man (and, more rarely, the working
woman), and also to challenge common misconceptions about
working-class life. The pride and resentment are evident in the
opening lines of the radical Thomas Hardy’s autobiography, pub-
lished in 1832:

As every man whose actions, from whatever cause, have acquired
publicity, is sure, in many things, to be misrepresented, such a man
has an undoubted right, nay, it becomes his duty, to leave to posterity
a true record of the real motives that influenced his conduct. The
following Memoir, therefore, requires no apology, and none is
offered . 6

Over 140 such works have survived from the period 1790-1850
alone.

Official papers and newspapers

The chronicles and memoirs that people write for future genera-
tions are, of course, only a small minority of what is published in
any period. Most publications are issued with little thought for
posterity; they are rather intended to inform, influence, mislead or
entertain contemporaries. The invention of printing in the fifteenth
century greatly facilitated the dissemination of such writings,
while the growth of literacy among the laity increased the demand
for them. Governments were quick to profit from the revolution
in communications, and by the nineteenth century statements of
policy, propaganda and digests of information on trade, revenue
and expenditure were flowing from the official presses. In Britain
perhaps the most impressive of these publications were the census
reports published every ten years from 1801, and the reports of
royal commissions set up from the 1830s onwards to take evidence
and make recommendations on major social problems such as
public health and conditions of work. Another official publication
of great interest is that of the reports of parliamentary proceedings.
Thomas Hansard began publication of the debates in the Lords and
Commons as a private venture in 1812 (though not quite the first of
its kind). The series assumed its modern format in 1909, when the
government, through His Majesty’s Stationery Office, took it over;
first-person, verbatim reporting became the rule. Few other sources
convey so well the public face of political discourse.

But the most important published primary source for the histo-
rian is the press, which in Britain has a continuous history dating

THE RAW MATERIALS

97

back to the early eighteenth century, the first daily newspaper
having been founded in 1702. Newspapers have a threefold value.
First, they record the political and social views that made most
impact at the time; indeed the earliest newspapers, which had
developed out of the vigorous tradition of pamphleteering during
the Civil War and Commonwealth (1642-60), contained little else
and are remembered now for the brilliant polemics of Addison,
Steele and Swift. To this day the leaders and correspondence
columns of the great London dailies offer the best entry into the
current state of establishment opinion - provided due allowance
is made for the editorial bias of the paper in question. Second,
newspapers provide a day-to-day record of events. During the
nineteenth century this function began to be filled much more
fully, particularly when the development of the electric telegraph
in the 1850s enabled journalists in distant postings to file their
copy home as soon as it was written. W.H. Russell of The Times
was one of the first to take advantage of this revolution in com-
munications. His celebrated dispatches from the Crimea during
the war of 1854-6, which provided shocking evidence of the dis-
array of the British forces, had a major impact on public opinion
at home and still make compelling reading. 7 As sources of straight
reporting, newspapers are likely to become even more valuable to
historians in the future. For despite the vast archives that govern-
ments and corporations continue to amass, important decisions
are increasingly communicated by telephone and e-mail rather
than by letter, and information obtained informally by journalists
at the time may provide the only contemporary written record
of what has taken place. Lastly, newspapers from time to time
present the results of more thorough enquiries into issues that
lie beyond the scope of routine news reporting. The founder of
this tradition was Henry Mayhew, an impecunious writer briefly
employed by the Morning Chronicle in 1849-50. As ‘Special
Correspondent for the Metropolis’ he wrote a series of articles
exposing social conditions among the London poor in the after-
math of the great cholera epidemic of 1849, which later formed
the basis of his book London Labour and the London Poor
(1851). Few investigative journalists since then have equalled
Mayhew in the thoroughness of his research or in his impact on
contemporary opinion. 8

Hansard

Named after its founder,
Thomas Hansard
0776-1833), this is
the name given to the
daily written reports on
proceedings in Parliament.
In its early versions, the
Parliamentary History
wrote in reported speech
('He said he would . . .')
and sometimes described
the scene in the chamber
rather than reproducing
the exact word. The
development of shorthand
enabled reporters to
reproduce the exact words
spoken.

verbatim

Reported word for word.

Commonwealth

From 1 649 to 1 654
England was ruled as a
republic, known as the
Commonwealth, and
from 1654 to 1659 as
a Protectorate under
Oliver Cromwell. The
constitutional and political
uncertainty of the period
saw the production
of a huge number of
pamphlets laying out
conflicting political and
religious theories about
the direction in which the
country ought to move.

establishment

A term originally coined
by young satirists and
radical writers in the
1 960s to denote all those
persons, institutions and
attitudes that do well out
of the status quo and wish
therefore to preserve it.

98

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

file their copy

To file copy' is a
journalistic term for
submitting the text of an
article.

Crimea

The Crimean War (1 854-
6), in which Britain fought
alongside France and
Turkey against Russia,
was marked by serious
administrative inefficiency
and incompetence
in British military
administration. As a result,
the figures who emerged
with most credit from the
war were those, like the
journalist William Howard
Russell or the nursing
administrator Florence
Nightingale, who exposed
its shortcomings, and the
ordinary British soldier
who suffered from them.

impecunious

Poor, short of money.

Chaucer (c.1 340-1 400)

Geoffrey Chaucer, English
poet and author of The
Canterbury Tales. The
tales cover a wide range of
subjects and social classes,
and are therefore heavily
used by historians of the
late Middle Ages.

'condition of England'
question

A phrase used by the
1 840s to denote the
questions surrounding
the problems of poverty,
squalor and relations
between the rich and the
poor.

Literature as historical source material

There is one other kind of source intended for the eyes of con-
temporaries (and often for posterity too) that historians have to
consider, though it is rather a special case: this is creative litera-
ture. Novels and plays cannot, of course, be treated as factual
reports, however great the element of autobiography or social
observation may be. Nor, needless to say, do historical novels - or
Shakespeare’s history plays for that matter - carry any authority
as historical statements about the periods to which they refer. But
all creative literature offers insights into the social and intellec-
tual milieu in which the writer lived, and often vivid descriptions
of the physical setting as well. The success of an author is often
attributable to the way in which he or she articulates the values
and preoccupations of literary contemporaries. So it makes good
sense to cite Chaucer as a spokesman for the attitudes of the
fourteenth-century laity to abuses in the Church, or Dickens as
evidence of the frame of mind in which middle-class Victorians
considered the ‘condition of England’ question.

Ill

Record sources: memos, minutes and official
correspondence

Because newspapers, official publications and parliamentary
speeches are composed mostly with a view to their impact on
contemporary opinion, historians attach greater weight to them
than to the chronicles and memoirs written with the requirements
of posterity in mind. But the very fact of publication sets a limit
on the value of all these sources. They contain only what was con-
sidered to be fit for public consumption - what governments were
prepared to reveal, what journalists could elicit from tight-lipped
informants, what editors thought would gratify their readers, or
MPs their constituents. In each case there is a controlling purpose
which may limit, distort or falsify what is said. The historian who
wishes, in Ranke’s phrase, ‘to show how things actually were’
(see pp. 19) must go behind the published word, and that is why
the greatest advances in modern historical knowledge have been
based on research into ‘records’ - confidential documents such
as letters, minutes and diaries. It is in these forms that men and
women record their decisions, discussions and sometimes their

THE RAW MATERIALS

99

innermost thoughts, unmindful of the eyes of future historians.
Time and again, historians have found that a careful study of the
record sources reveals a picture very different from the confident
generalizations of contemporary observers. In nineteenth-century
England the medical writer William Acton declared that respect-
able women experienced no sexual feelings of any kind, and his
view has been much cited as evidence of Victorian repression;
only when the letters and diaries between spouses were examined
did it become clear that a much wider range of sexual responses
existed among married women. 9 Whether the question at issue is
the motives of the participants in the English Civil War, or the
impact of the Industrial Revolution on standards of living, or the
volume of the Atlantic slave trade, there is no substitute for the
painstaking accumulation of evidence from the record sources of
the period.

In most countries the largest single body of unpublished records
is that belonging to the state, and since Ranke’s day more research
has been devoted to government archives than to any other kind
of source. In the West the oldest surviving state archives took
shape during the twelfth century, which saw a marked advance in
the sophistication of government organization all over Europe. In
England a continuous series of revenue records - the Pipe Rolls
of the Exchequer - extends back to 1155, and the records of the
royal courts (King’s Bench and Common Pleas) to 1194. The
beginning of systematic record-keeping can be dated precisely to
1199. In that year King John’s Chancellor, Hubert Walter, began
the practice of making copies on parchment rolls of all the more
important letters dispatched from Chancery in the king’s name.
Even after the emergence of other departments in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, the Chancery remained the nerve centre
of royal administration, and its enrolments are the most impor-
tant archival source for the Middle Ages in England.

Chancery

The royal secretariat
in medieval times,
administered by the King's
Chancellor.

The records of bureaucracy

During the period 1450-1550 the medieval system was super-
seded by a more bureaucratic administrative structure controlled
by the Privy Council. The most powerful single official within this
structure was the King’s Secretary (later called the Secretary of
State), and from the reign of Henry VIII his records, known as the
State Papers, become the most rewarding source for the policies

Thomas Cromwell
(c.1 485-1 540)

Secretary successively to
Cardinal Wolsey and to
King Henry VIII. Cromwell
oversaw the dissolution
of the monasteries,
which involved rigorous
examination of the internal
affairs of monasteries,
convents and abbeys.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

and actions of the government. In contrast to Chancery records
the State Papers, to quote Galbraith,

are not the routine products of an office, but the intimate and
miscellaneous correspondence of an official whose duties knew
no fixed limits . . . The veil that separates us from character and
personality in the Middle Ages is torn aside. 10

Among the State Papers for 1536 there survives this letter
summoning an unfortunate priest from Leicestershire to an inter-
rogation, probably in connection with treason; the menacing tone
is unmistakable:

I commend me unto you. Letting you wit the King’s pleasure and
commandment is that, all excuses and delays set apart, ye shall
incontinently upon the sight hereof repair unto me wheresoever I shall
chance to be, the specialties whereof ye shall know at your coming.
Without failing thus to do, as ye will answer at your peril. From the
Rolls, the 8th day of July. Thomas Crumwell [sic]. 11

It is this category of document that proliferated in the following
centuries, as additional Secretaries of State were appointed to
run new departments that could keep abreast of the expanding
scope of government. By the nineteenth century each department
of state was keeping a systematic record of letters and papers
received, copies of letters sent out and memoranda circulating
within the department. At the apex of this complex bureaucratic
structure stands the Cabinet. For the first 200 years of its exist-
ence, its deliberations were entirely ‘off the record’, but since
1916 the Cabinet Secretariat has kept minutes of the Cabinet’s
weekly meetings and prepared papers for its use.

Another aspect of the enlargement of government under the
Tudors was the beginning of routine diplomacy conducted by
resident ambassadors. The Italian states set the pattern in the
1480s and 1490s; other countries soon followed, and England’s
diplomatic network had taken shape by the 1520s. The Venetian
ambassador who, in the course of twelve months in 1503-4,
sent back from Rome 472 dispatches, was more industrious than
most, 12 but regular reporting home was from the start an essential
part of the ambassador’s duties. These reports not only document
the conduct of foreign policy more fully than ever before; they
also record the diplomat’s appraisal of the court and country
to which he was accredited. Ranke relied on them heavily for
both political and diplomatic history, and there have been many

THE RAW MATERIALS

1 01

historians since whose expertise is almost entirely limited to dip-
lomatic documents. By the late nineteenth century - often thought
of as the ‘golden age’ of diplomatic history - the documentary
record is so full that the historian can reconstruct every stage in a
diplomatic initiative from the first tentative proposal of a ministry
official to the completed report on the negotiations.

The nineteenth century was also the period when government
began to make systematic records of the entire population. The
census aims to list all the members of a country or community
alive at any one time; without it absolute numbers cannot be
determined, nor whether the population is increasing or declining.
In Britain a census has been taken at ten-yearly intervals since
1801, and it is generally conceded that after 1841 (when the
name of each individual was noted for the first time), errors in
the totals are statistically insignificant. Other listings survive from
earlier periods - tax returns, returns of church communicants,
declarations of political loyalty and the like. But, though compre-
hensive in intent, these were seldom so in practice, and the margin
of error is very uncertain and inconsistent. At the same time as
the census was being developed, Britain set up a comprehensive
system of civil registration to record all ‘vital’ events, i.e. births,
marriages and deaths, on the basis of which much more accurate
demographic projections could be made. Since then, the range and
volume of data amassed by government about the population as
a whole has steadily increased.

Church records

Two other types of record share the official character of central
government records. First, during the Middle Ages the Church
wielded as much, if not more, authority than the state, and in
most European countries it retained many of its powers in the
secular sphere until the early nineteenth century. Its history is
fully documented by the immense quantity of Church records
that are available to historians today, many of them still virtu-
ally untouched. Royal charters granting land and privileges to
the Church have been preserved from the early Middle Ages,
and copious records document the efficiency of episcopal and
monastic administration. The records of the Church courts are
more interesting than might seem likely at first glance, because so
many moral misdemeanours of ordinary people came within their

episcopal

Pertaining to bishops.

Church courts

Church courts dealt with
offences against canon
(i.e. Church) law, rather
than civil offences, which
were dealt with in the
king's courts. Church
courts often dealt with
cases of sexual immorality.

1 02

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

laity

'Lay' people, i.e. those
who are not members of
the clergy.

jurisdiction. In sixteenth and early seventeenth-century England,
for example, when the established Church’s position vis-a-vis
the Puritan sects was under threat, strenuous efforts were made
through the Church courts to discipline the laity, and the records
of these courts are therefore an important source for the social
historian, particularly as regards sexual misdemeanours and
sexual defamation. 13 The Church courts also retained jurisdiction
over wills in England until 1858, and from Elizabeth I’s reign
onwards they insisted on detailed inventories of all movable prop-
erty, which can now tell the historian a great deal about wealth,
status and standards of living.

Local government and private firms

Second, there are the records of local government. During the
thirteenth century in England lords of the manor began to follow
the king’s example and keep records - and particularly judicial
records, since they had legal jurisdiction over their tenants and
servants. One result is that changes in landholding are relatively
well documented for rich and poor alike. The first Justices of the
Peace were commissioned by the Crown in the fourteenth century,
and under the Tudors they were saddled with a mounting load
of responsibility - for matters as various as policing, poor relief,
wage regulation and military recruitment. Much of this burden
was discharged during quarter sessions held at three-monthly
intervals in each county, and recorded by a Clerk of the Peace.
This remained the basis of local government in England until the
modern system of county and borough councils was established
during the nineteenth century. Until that time a high proportion
of local records are legal: the same individuals - whether lords of
the manor or Justices of the Peace - were charged with judicial
as well as administrative duties. Of all public records, the court
records of everyday and often trivial disputes and misdemeanours
shed most light on the wider society beyond the small world of
government.

The records of the Church and local administration might seem
to be of marginal interest. In fact they are crucial to the prospects
of social history. The limited scope of the first ventures in social
history is partly explained by the tendency of historians to take
the line of least resistance and follow the trail through the records
of institutions with an avowedly ‘social’ function - schools,

THE RAW MATERIALS

1 03

hospitals, trade unions and such; the result was all too often work
of a narrowly institutional character. But social history as it is now
understood demands a great deal more. Social groups do not leave
corporate records. Their composition and their place in the social
structure have to be reconstructed from a broad range of sources
composed for quite different and usually much more mundane
reasons. This is especially true of the history of the common
people. Their conditions and opinions became the subject of sys-
tematic social surveys only during the nineteenth century. Until
then, the picture that we form of them is inevitably dominated
by those activities that brought down on them the attention of
the authorities: destitution, litigation, sedition, and - most of all
- common crime and offences against Church discipline. At times
of popular discontent this attention was particularly intrusive,
and whole areas of society which normally remain ‘invisible’ may
be illuminated by legal and police records. The riots that periodi-
cally broke out in eighteenth-century London are a case in point. 14
Equally, fear of revolution may intensify official surveillance of
lower-class activities, as in England during the Napoleonic Wars:
‘But for spies, narks and letter-copiers, the history of the English
working class would be unknown’, wrote E.P. Thompson, with
only a little overstatement. 15 Such opportunities are all the more
precious because at other times information about the common
people is usually much thinner. Court records are still useful, but
in more settled conditions judicial activity was less intense, and it
is therefore much more difficult to build up the profile of a local
community. Before any generalization can be made with confi-
dence, a vast quantity of court records has to be sifted, usually in
conjunction with other local sources such as manorial records, tax
registers, wills and the records of charitable institutions.

Church and state are the oldest record-keeping institutions
in Western society. But from the fifteenth century onwards the
historian can supplement them with an ever-increasing volume
of records generated by private corporations and associations -
guilds, universities, trade unions, political parties and pressure
groups. Of particular interest are the records of businesses and
firms. Their beginnings are shrouded in obscurity. The only major
documentary archive of a medieval English trading firm which
has come down to us is the papers of the Cely family, who were
prominent in the export of wool to the Low Countries in the
1470s and 1480s. 16 By the eighteenth century commercial records

1 04

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

become really plentiful, and they are an essential source for histo-
rians of the Industrial Revolution. For example, the papers of the
Stockport textile manufacturer Samuel Oldknow were discovered
quite by chance in a disused mill in 1921; covering the period
1782-1812, they provide vivid documentation for the transition
from the domestic to the factory system of production. 17 Many
companies today have cash-books, inventories and ledgers dating
back to the same period or earlier; the historian of England’s
brewing industry recalls:

The family continuity in the industry has been such that in most
cases I found myself working on the letters and the accounts of
the ancestors of the present owners and managers of the concerns,
reading their records on the same site where they had brewed in the
eighteenth century . 18

The records he examined included those of such well-known
names as Whitbread, Charrington and Truman.

IV

Private papers

As a general rule, those activities which leave most evidence
behind are organized activities, and especially those controlled by
bodies that have a life-span beyond the careers of the individuals
who happen to staff them at any one time - whether they be
governments, religious bodies or businesses. For the greater part
of recorded history, literate people have probably done most of
their writing in the course of their professional or official duties.
Nevertheless, there survives a vast mass of written material that
has been set down by men and women as private individuals,
outside the office or the counting house. Much the largest pro-
portion is accounted for by private correspondence, and from the
seventeenth century this becomes available in considerable quanti-
ties. For example, the Verneys were Buckinghamshire gentry who
wrote copiously and were careful to preserve their correspond-
ence. For the period between the 1630s and the mid-eighteenth
century more than 30,000 letters survive. Through such letters,
says Susan Whyman,

We can see how individuals coped in a society based upon lineage,
custom and manners. We can uncover a family’s social code, and note
whether they accepted or evaded its norms . . . We can see how people

THE RAW MATERIALS

brought stability to their lives by constructing networks, maintaining
friendships, and communicating with absent loved ones. Through
letters we can watch how people dealt with anxiety, illness, and
isolation . 19

Nor should it be supposed that the gentry had a monopoly
on letter-writing. Working-class people wrote fewer letters and
preserved fewer still. But the letters of far-flung family members
were sometimes kept, and they survive in considerable numbers
from the nineteenth century. Irish emigrants to Australia treasured
letters from home as ‘oceans of consolation’; David Fitzpatrick
has reconstituted the narratives of fourteen such families, drawing
on a total of 111 surviving letters. 20 Such material gives a human
face to a story more often presented in dry statistics.

There are no other sources that bring to life so clearly the
family and social relationships of people in the past. Without
private correspondence the biographer must be content with the
public or business life - which indeed is all that medieval biog-
raphies can usually attain. One of the main reasons why it is
possible to give a relatively full account of the private lives of the
Victorians is that an efficient and frequent postal service enabled
them to conduct a voluminous correspondence: an upper-class
woman whose marriage took her away from her own family
might write more than 400 letters in a single year. 21 This pattern
remained common until the spread of the telephone after the
First World War. But private letters are an essential source for
historians of politics as well. This is because government records
are more concerned with decisions and their implementation than
with the motives of the people who made them. The private cor-
respondence of public figures reveals much that is scarcely hinted
at in the official record. The nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies were the great age of personal correspondence, when close
colleagues in public life wrote to each other daily. Much of this
correspondence by-passed official channels and was intended to
be seen by none but the recipient. Some politicians confided to a
remarkable degree in friends who were without any formal posi-
tion in politics at all. For three of the years (1912-15) during
which he was Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith wrote once or twice
a day to a young lady called Venetia Stanley. In these letters he
could frankly express all his political anxieties and frustrations
(as well as many more trivial reflections), confident that his
remarks would go no further. Here, in a letter of March 1915,

H.H. Asquith
( 1858 - 1928 )

Liberal Prime Minister
before and during the First
World War, 1908-16.

1 06

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

is his assessment of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the
Admiralty:

As you know, like you, I am really fond of him; but I regard his
future with many misgivings . . . He will never get to the top in
English politics, with all his wonderful gifts; to speak with the
tongue of men & angels, and to spend laborious days & nights in
administration, is no good, if a man does not inspire trust . 22

John Evelyn
(1620-1706)

Although active in politics
after the Restoration,
Evelyn is best known for
his diary.

Samuel Pepys
(1633-1703)

As well as keeping his
celebrated diary, which
includes an account of the
Fire of London, Pepys was
also, as Secretary to the
Admiralty, a central figure
in the development of
British naval power.

Gladstone 1809-98)

William Ewart Gladstone
was a towering figure
in Victorian politics,
serving as Prime Minister
four times. His diary is
a detailed account of
his daily engagements,
including, obscured behind
a special code, his sexual
practices.

Diaries

Private letters are associated with another source that is in some
ways even more revealing of personality and opinion - the diary.
Diary-keeping began in the sixteenth century and soon became a
common literary accomplishment among the educated, especially
in England, which in John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys produced
two of the greatest masters of the art. Unlike chroniclers or annal-
ists, diarists are as much preoccupied with their own subjective
response as with the external events that they have witnessed.
The considerations that induce someone to devote several hours
each week to keeping up a diary are anything but frivolous. For
creative writers the diary satisfies the compulsion to observe and
reflect, free of the constraints imposed by the formal require-
ments of the novel, poem or play. Of politicians it is sometimes
assumed that a diary serves as little more than an aide-memoire to
be drawn on when the time comes to compose an autobiography.
But for most political diarists this is a secondary consideration
compared with the release from the intense pressures of life in
the public eye that a diary affords. The diary that Gladstone kept
from 1825 to 1896 has almost the character of a confessional: the
record of daily engagements and political commentaries is broken
up by long passages of painful self-analysis, an unremitting quest
for purity of soul. 23 No historian who has not read the diary can
hope to understand the personality of this giant among Victorian
statesmen. In the case of the Labour politician, Hugh Dalton,
diary-writing seems to have filled a psychological need directly
related to his political performance. As Ben Pimlott explains,
the diary, which spans the years 1916 to 1960, acted both as a
‘soundingboard for ideas’ and as a safety-valve for Dalton’s ‘very
strong instinct towards political self-destructiveness’, being fullest
for those times when he was consumed by feelings of resentment
or irritation against his closest political associates. 24

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1 07

For the historian of twentieth-century politics, letters and
diaries are of particular significance, despite the almost limitless
volume of official records. In the course of the last two generations
ministers and civil servants have tended to become more discreet
in their official correspondence. During the nineteenth century
such correspondence was occasionally published by authority,
for example in the Blue Books laid by British ministers before
Parliament; but this was usually done almost immediately, for
pressing propaganda reasons, and the published dispatches had
in some cases been composed with that express purpose. In the
1920s, however, the select publication of official records grew out
of all proportion, as governments strove to excuse themselves,
and blame others, for responsibility for the First World War,
often with scant regard for the reputation of individual officials
twenty or thirty years earlier. Ministers and civil servants, espe-
cially those concerned with foreign policy, became much more
inhibited in their official correspondence; what they wrote to
each other privately, or recorded in their diaries, therefore gains
in interest. Moreover, much that politicians do say in the course
of their ministerial duties does not find its way into the official
record. The civil servants who compile Cabinet minutes, for
example, are primarily concerned with the decisions reached; the
heated political arguments, which are what interest the historian
most about Cabinet meetings, go largely unrecorded. Richard
Crossman, who served as a Cabinet minister under Flarold Wilson
from 1964 to 1970, kept a weekly diary which was intended, as
he put it, to do something towards ‘lighting up the secret places
of British politics’, among which the Cabinet featured promi-
nently. 25 Crossman’s diary is unusual in that, almost from the
outset, he envisaged its publication within a few years; his work
bears comparison with ‘memoirs’ in the sense understood by great
eighteenth century memoirists such as Saint-Simon or Flervey. By
contrast, the vast majority of the diaries and letters available to
the historian were written without thought of a wider readership.
Of all sources they are the most spontaneous and unvarnished,
revealing both the calculated stratagems and the unconscious
assumptions of public figures.

Hugh Dalton
( 1887 - 1962 )

Labour politician.

As Chancellor of the
Exchequer in Clement
Attlee's 1945 government,
Dalton played a central
role in the postwar
nationalization of heavy
industry.

Blue Books

Reports of Victorian
parliamentary committees
and commissions were
published - often selling
surprisingly well - and
were known as Blue Books
after the colour of their
covers.

Richard Crossman
( 1907 - 74 )

Labour politician. Under
Harold Wilson he was
Minister of Housing and
the first ever Secretary of
State for Health and Social
Security. The posthumous
publication of his diaries in
1975-9 created something
of a sensation because of
their revelations about the
in-fighting and internal
politics at the heart of
Wilson's government.

1 08

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

V

mutatis mutandis

(Latin) Those things
needing to be changed
having been changed'; in
other words, when due
allowance has been made
for differences.

Why do sources survive?

From this discussion about the different categories of source
material it will be apparent that a variety of factors have con-
tributed to the survival of so much documentation from the past.
Private letters and diaries have owed their survival to the writer’s
desire for posthumous fame, or the family piety of the heirs, or
perhaps their inertia in leaving trunks and drawers undisturbed.
In the case of public records the reasons are more straightforward
and more compelling: they arise from the central role of written
precedent in law and administration since the High Middle Ages.
To put it bluntly, governments needed an accurate record of what
was due to them in taxes, dues and services, while the king’s
subjects cherished evidence of privileges and exemptions that had
been granted to them in the past. As the royal bureaucracy grew
bigger and more unwieldy, it became increasingly necessary for
officials to have a record of what their predecessors had done.
As the practice of diplomacy became more formalized from the
fifteenth century onwards, ministers could review the earlier rela-
tions of their governments with foreign powers and be briefed on
their obligations and entitlements under foreign treaties. What
was true of governments applied mutatis mutandis to other cor-
porate bodies such as the Church, or the great trading companies
and financial houses. The only way in which institutions with this
sort of permanence could have a ‘memory’ was if a careful record
of their transactions was preserved.

But practical motives are not everything. Written documents are
also fragile, and the fact that they have weathered the hazards of
fire, flood and sheer neglect in such profusion also requires expla-
nation. Continuity of government and of basic law and order are
vital. Throughout most of Europe the fabric of literate civilization
has endured without a break since the early Middle Ages. Within
Europe the distribution of the surviving documentation is largely
explained by the incidence of warfare and revolutionary upheaval.
It is because England has had little of either that English medieval
public records are so plentiful. Last but not least, the growth of
historical consciousness itself has had important consequences in
minimizing the destruction of documents once they have ceased to
be of practical use. Here the Renaissance was the turning point.
Curiosity about classical antiquity bred an antiquarian mentality

THE RAW MATERIALS

1 09

which valued the relics of the past for their own sake - hence the
beginning of both archaeology and the systematic conservation of
manuscripts and books. It is the combination of these factors that
accounts for the uniquely rich documentation for the history of
Western society and distinguishes it from the other great literate
cultures of China, India and the Muslim world, where the survival
of written sources has been much more patchy.

Conservation and publication

Only relatively recently, however, has it become a reasonably
simple matter to locate the sources and secure access to them.
Without the coming of age of historical studies in the mid-
nineteenth century and the growing political awareness of the
need to preserve the raw materials of a national past, historians
today would face a much more daunting prospect. Their task
is easiest in the case of published sources. In England there is a
good chance that the researcher, assisted by bibliographies and
catalogues, will find what he or she wants in one of the great
‘copyright’ libraries, which by Act of Parliament are entitled to
a free copy of every book and pamphlet published in the United
Kingdom; the most complete is the British Library (until 1973 the
British Museum), whose entitlement dates back to 1757 and has
been rigorously enforced since the 1840s. Today more and more
historic publications are appearing on the Internet, where they
can be accessed much more easily and searched for specific data.
A fine example is the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, covering
the period 1674 to 1913, and featuring nearly 200,000 criminal
trials, in many cases in great detail: the editors of the website are
almost certainly correct in describing it as ‘the largest body of
texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published’. 26

But what of the unpublished sources? The conservation of
public and private documents, many of them written with no
thought for the requirements of storage and reference, presents
a considerable challenge. In some cases the problems have been
partially solved by publication. An immense effort was devoted
to this task during the nineteenth century, when the historical
value of records gained common acceptance for the first time. The
pattern was set by the Monumenta Germaniae Historica series,
which began publication with government support in 1826 under
the direction of the best historians of the day; by the 1860s most

copyright libraries

Other copyright libraries,
in addition to the British
Library, are Cambridge
University Library, the
Bodleian Library, Oxford,
the National Libraries
of Wales and Scotland,
and the Library of Trinity
College, Dublin.

1 1 0

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

of the raw materials for medieval German history were in print. 27
Other countries quickly followed suit, including Britain, where the
equivalent Rolls Series began to appear in 1858. The original pro-
moters of these projects intended to publish all the extant primary
sources. Even for the medieval period this was an ambitious goal;
for later, more lavishly documented periods it was an obvious
impossibility. In the late nineteenth century, therefore, attention
was increasingly switched to the publication of ‘calendars’, or full
summaries of the records. Calendars are an immense help to the
researcher, but only because they indicate which documents are
relevant to his or her purpose; they are no substitute for perusal
of the documents in full. Here too the Internet has an increasingly
vital role to play. Although it is hard to imagine a time when all
archives will be accessed in this way, whole collections have been
put online, thus raising their profile with researchers. In Britain
the original enumerators’ books for the census of 1901 and 1911
are available online; though primarily exploited by people tracing
their ancestors, they also provide raw material for a wide range
of social history applications. 28

Archives

In most countries the historian’s task is greatly eased by an elabo-
rate archive service. But this is a relatively recent development, and
the survival of documents from the remote past has often owed
more to luck than good management. Many archival collections
have perished by accident: the Whitehall fire of 1619 destroyed
many of the Privy Council papers, and the fire that swept the
Palace of Westminster in 1834 took with it most of the records
belonging to the House of Commons. Other holdings have been
deliberately destroyed for political reasons: a prominent feature of
the agrarian revolts which broke out in the French countryside in
July 1789 was the burning of manorial archives that authorized
the exaction of heavy dues from the peasantry. 29 In Africa during
the 1960s departing colonial officials sometimes destroyed their
files for fear that sensitive material would fall into the hands of
their African successors.

In England, as elsewhere in Europe, the conservation of
archives by the state dates back to the twelfth century. But until
the nineteenth century each department of government retained
its own archives. They were housed all over London in a variety of

THE RAW MATERIALS

1 1 1

When the French
Revolution broke out in
1789, many villagers took
the opportunity to attack
the chateaux of their local
landowners and destroy
all documents recording
the feudal taxes and
services they owed. Many
other documents went
up in smoke at the same
time, a major blow to
future historians of French
history.

(Mary Evans Picture
Library)

buildings, many of them highly unsuitable. Throughout the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries the Chancery records in the Tower
were kept above the Ordnance Board’s gunpowder stores , 30 while
other repositories were exposed to the ravages of damp and
rodents. These conditions not only frustrated private litigants
(and the occasional historian) wishing to track down precedents
but were also an embarrassment to the government itself: it was
not unknown for the original of an important treaty to elude the
most diligent search . 31 The mid-nineteenth century was a period
of reform in this as in so many other spheres of administration.
The Public Record Office was set up by Act of Parliament in

1 1 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

1838, and within twenty years it had gained custody of all the
main classes of government record (it was renamed the National
Archives in 2003). Without that reorganization the immense
progress made in the study of English medieval history - the
greatest achievement of British historians in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries - would scarcely have been possible.
Today the National Archives in Britain is the largest archive in
the world (with over 100 miles of shelving) and offers probably
the most up-to-date facilities to be found anywhere. In the course
of the nineteenth century the archives of most other European
countries were reorganized and made available to researchers. A
comparable process has taken place in the new states of Asia and
Africa which won independence between the 1940s and 1970s.
The consolidation of the records of colonial administration into a
national archive was one of the first tasks undertaken in pursuit
of a properly documented national past.

As the interests of historians have been enlarged to cover
social and economic themes (see Chapter 3), the conservation
and organization of local records have been increasingly taken
in hand. This has been a formidable undertaking which has won
scant public recognition. Under legislation passed in 1963 every
county in England and Wales is required to maintain a county
record office, whose job is to gather together the different cat-
egories of local record - quarter sessions, parish, borough and
manorial records, etc. Many of the record offices originated in
local initiatives taken before the Second World War, and they
have extended their search well beyond the semi-official catego-
ries to include the records of businesses, estates and associations.
Today the holdings of all the county record offices almost cer-
tainly exceed those of the National Archives. Local and regional
studies have become a practicable proposition for professional
historians for the first time.

Restrictions on access

Nowhere, however, have historians been granted complete freedom
of access to public records. If historians were allowed to inspect
files as soon as they had ceased to be in current use, they would
be reading material that was only a few years old. All govern-
ments, whatever their political complexion, depend on a measure
of confidentiality, and they tend to interpret this requirement very

THE RAW MATERIALS

1 1 3

rigorously. Civil servants expect to be reasonably secure in the
knowledge that what they set down officially shall not be publicly
discussed in the foreseeable future. In Britain the ‘closed period’
laid down for public records varied considerably according to the
department of origin until it was standardized at fifty years in
1958. Nine years later, after a vigorous campaign by historians,
this period was reduced to thirty years. France followed suit in
1970, but in some countries, for example Italy, fifty years is still
the rule. Everywhere governments do not hesitate to withhold
indefinitely documents that relate to particularly sensitive epi-
sodes - for example the Irish crisis of 1916-22 and the abdication
of 1936 in Britain, and in France several issues that arose during
the decline of the Third Republic in the late 1930s. In the United
States the Freedom of Information Act of 1975 allows both his-
torians and the general public much wider access, but elsewhere
the reduction of the closed period to thirty years is probably as
far as the liberalization of access to public records is likely to go.
Clearly this has major implications for the study of contemporary
history, where historians are forced to rely much more than they
would like on what was made public at the time, or what has been
disclosed retrospectively in memoirs and diaries.

Yet, however galling these restrictions may seem, in Britain
government archives are at least centralized and accessible. The
same broadly applies to local public records. The case is entirely
different with records in private hands. These are widely dispersed
and subject to varying - and sometimes perverse - conditions of
access; and while governments have usually acknowledged the
need for some kind of archive conservation, however rudimen-
tary, family and business records, which may serve no practical
function, have often been completely neglected. Nor can the
historian whose interest is confined to official documents afford
to ignore these private collections. Until the Cabinet Secretariat
laid down firm guidelines after 1916, it was common for retiring
ministers and officials to keep official papers in their possession;
from the sixteenth century onwards, a steady flow of State Papers
passed out of public custody in this way, 32 and to this day most
of the State Papers dating from Robert Cecil’s tenure of office
(1596-1612) are at Hatfield House.

In most European countries one of the functions of the national
libraries that were set up during the nineteenth century has been
to secure possession of the most valuable private manuscript

Irish crisis of 1916-22

The Easter Rising in Dublin
in 1916 against British
rule in Ireland triggered
a long period of guerrilla
warfare between the Irish
Republican Army (IRA)
and the British security
forces, which culminated
in the establishment of the
Irish Free State in 1922.

abdication

The accession of King
Edward VIII in 1936
proved problematic
because of objections to
his proposed marriage to
Mrs Wallis Simpson, an
American woman soon
to divorce her second
husband. Rather than give
up Mrs Simpson, the king
decided to abdicate in
favour of his brother the
Duke of York, who thus
became King George VI.

decline of Third
Republic in 1930s

In the 1 930s France
went through a period of
internal conflict, strikes
and political crisis that at
times seemed to mirror
contemporary Spain's
descent into civil war. The
divisions in French society
came into the open when
the country fell to the
Germans in May 1940.

Robert Cecil
(1563-1612)

Son of Queen Elizabeth I's
minister. Sir William Cecil,
Robert Cecil served as
Secretary of State under
both Elizabeth and James
I. Hatfield House is the
Cecil family home.

1 1 4

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

collections. Britain’s national library dates back to the foundation
of the British Museum in 1753. Of its foundation manuscript col-
lections, the most important from the historian’s point of view is
that of Sir Robert Cotton, the early seventeenth-century collector
and antiquarian; this numbered among its treasures a great many
State Papers, one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and two
of the four surviving ‘exemplifications’ of Magna Carta (i.e. copies
made at the time of the agreement between King John and the
barons in 1215). Purchases and bequests since then have made the
British Library far and away the largest repository of historical
manuscripts in Britain outside the National Archives. Even so, the
number of important documents held elsewhere is incalculable.
Many private collections have been given or loaned indefinitely
to public libraries, or to the county record offices. But many
more remain in the hands of private individuals, companies and
associations. For over a hundred years the Historical Manuscripts
Commission has promoted the care of manuscripts privately held
in Britain and located their whereabouts, but there is still scope for
the historian with a nose for detective work. Several of the collec-
tions of private papers on which Namier relied for his studies in
eighteenth-century English politics were discovered during what
he called his ‘cross-country paper-chases’. 33

Unearthing source material

The position is worst in the case of the personal and ephemeral
materials in the hands of ordinary people - the account books
of small businesses, the minute books of local clubs, everyday
personal correspondence and the like. Neither the local record
offices nor the Historical Manuscripts Commission cast their net
as widely as this, yet the recovery of everyday documentation
is important if historians are ever to make good their oft-stated
aspiration to treat the masses and not just their masters. This is
a task for historians with a local focus everywhere, and exciting
finds are sometime made by apprentice researchers. Since people
are usually unaware that they hold material that might be his-
torically significant, historians cannot wait for documents to be
brought forward; they need to engage in propaganda and go out
in search of them.

It might be supposed that a clear division of labour exists
between archivists and historians, with the former locating the

THE RAW MATERIALS

1 1 5

materials and the latter putting them to use. These examples show
that historians cannot in practice leave the task of tracking down
documentation to others. The first step in any programme of his-
torical research, then, is to establish the full extent of the sources.
Considerable perseverance and ingenuity may be required even at
this early stage.

Roman historians

Roman history poses a problem for the historian because we are
so heavily dependent on the accounts of Roman historians about
whose sources we know very little. Julius Caesar (100-44 bce)
wrote detailed accounts of his campaigns in Gaul and against his
political rival Pompey which are generally regarded as valuable
but heavily one-sided. Cornelius Tacitus (ad 55-120) seems to
have used his access to senatorial records to write his histories of
the early years of the empire. Tacitus took a gloomy view of the
growth of imperial power, but without access to his own sources
we have no yardstick against which to check his version of events.
Gaius Suetonius (ad 69-140) wrote a series of short sketches of
the first twelve Roman Emperors which became the model for
biographical writing, but his habit of recording accurate detail
alongside gossip and hearsay, without any attempt to distinguish
between the two, makes him a particularly problematic source.

Satire as a source

Satire is a potent but difficult source for historians. It dates very
quickly and is often full of allusions and references to people
and events that have sunk into obscurity. Its reliance on irony, in
which writers say the opposite of what they mean, can mislead
the unwary student. It is also easy to fall into the trap of assuming
wrongly that the satirists’ views were universally held. There
was a thriving market in eighteenth-century England for satirical
journals, like The Tatler and The Spectator. Jonathan Swift’s
famous Gulliver’s Travels was originally a scathing satire on Whig
politics and society, though it has survived as a fantasy tale for
children in a way Swift could never have anticipated.

‘Namierism’

Sir Lewis Namier (1888-1960) was a historian of eighteenth-
century politics who developed a new approach to political

1 1 6

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

history through exhaustive documentary study. His 1929 work
The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III was based
upon the accumulation of biographical details of every single MP
and member of the House of Lords in 1760. This comprehensive
approach to the study of institutions is properly known as
prosopography. He adopted a similarly exhaustive approach
to his study of the Duke of Newcastle (Prime Minister 1754-6
and 1757-62), whom he once said he felt he knew better than
he knew his own wife. Namier’s work led to the setting up of
the multi-volume History of Parliament, which contains detailed
studies of individual MPs and constituencies.

Further reading

J.J. Bagley, Historical Interpretation, vol. I: Sources of English Medieval
History, 1066-1540, Penguin, 1965.

J.J. Bagley, Historical Interpretation, vol. II: Sources of English History,
1540 to the Present Day, Penguin, 1971.

Miriam Dobson & Benjamin Ziemann (eds), Readitig Primary Sources,
Routledge, 2008.

Michael Moss, ‘Archives, the historian and the future’, in Michael
Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography, Routledge, 1997.

Elizabeth Hallam & Michael Roper, ‘The capital and the records of the
nation: seven centuries of housing the public records in London’,

The London Journal, IV, 1978.

Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers,
1600-1945, Ashgate, 1999.

David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises, Nelson, 1963.

Andrew McDonald, ‘Public records and the modern historian’,
Twentieth-Century British History, I, 1990.

Notes

1 Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical
Method, Knopf, 1950, pp. 53-5.

2 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Manchester University Press,
1954, p. 61.

3 Extract from Gerald of Wales, Expugnatio Hibernica, translated

THE RAW MATERIALS

1 1 7

from the Latin in D.C. Douglas and G.W. Greenaway (eds), English
Historical Documents, 1042-1189, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1953,
p. 386.

4 The best example is the autobiography of Pope Pius II, composed in
the late 1460s. See Leona C. Gabel (ed.), Memoirs of a Renaissance
Pope: The Commentaries of Pius II, Allen & Unwin, 1960.

5 David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and
Writing the Second World War, Allen Lane, 2004.

6 Quoted in David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study
of Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiography, Methuen,
1981, p. 26.

7 See Kellow Chesney, Crimean War Reader, Severn House, 1975.

8 E.P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (eds), The Unknown Mayhew:
Selections from the Morning Chronicle, 1849-50, Penguin, 1973.

9 Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. II: The
Tender Passion, Oxford University Press, 1986; John Tosh, A Man’s
Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England,
Yale University Press, 1999, ch. 3.

10 V.H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Use of the Public Records,
Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 54-5.

11 Thomas Cromwell to John Harding, 8 July 1536, quoted in G.R.
Elton, Policy and Police, Cambridge University Press, 1972,

pp. 342-3.

12 Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy, Cape, 1962, pp. 110, 306.

13 See, for example, Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women’s
Words and Sex in Early Modern London, Oxford University Press,
1996.

14 See, for example, George Rude, Paris and London in the Eighteenth
Century: Studies in Popular Protest, Fontana, 1970. For a critical
review, see Joanna Innes and John Styles, ‘The crime wave: recent
writing on crime and criminal justice in eighteenth-century England’,
Journal of British Studies, XXV, 1986, pp. 380-435.

15 E.P. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight, Merlin Press, 1980, p. 126.

16 Alison Hanham (ed.), The Cely Letters 1472-1488, Oxford
University Press, 1975.

17 George Unwin, Samuel Oldknow and the Arkwrights, Manchester
University Press, 1924.

18 Peter Matthias, The Brewing Industry in England, 1700-1830,
Cambridge University Press, 1959, p. xii.

19 Susan Whyman, ‘“Paper visits”: the post-Restoration letter as seen
through the Verney family archive’, in Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary
Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945, Ashgate, 1999, p. 25.

1 1 8

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

20 David Fitzpatrick, Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish
Migration to Australia , Cornell University Press, 1994.

21 Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860-1914, Oxford
University Press, 1988, pp. 3-4.

22 H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. M. and E. Brock,
Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 508.

23 M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew (eds), The Gladstone Diaries, 14
vols, Oxford University Press, 1968-94.

24 Ben Pimlott, ‘Hugh Dalton’s diaries’, The Listener, 17 July 1980. An
edited version of the diaries was published by LSE in association with
Jonathan Cape in two volumes in 1986.

25 Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, vol. I, Hamish
Hamilton and Cape, 1975, p. 12.

26 www.oldbaileyonline.org

27 David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises, Nelson, 1963,
pp. 65-97.

28 www.1901censusonline.com; www.1911census.co.uk

29 Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789, New Left Books, 1973,

pp. 100-21.

30 Elizabeth M. Hallam and Michael Roper, ‘The capital and the
records of the nation: seven centuries of housing the public records in
London’, The London Journal, IV, 1978, pp. 74-5.

31 R.B. Wernham, ‘The public records in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries’, in Levi Fox (ed.), English Historical Scholarship in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1956,

pp. 21-2.

32 Ibid., pp. 20-3.

33 Julia Namier, Lewis Namier: A Biography, Oxford University Press,
1971, p. 282.

CHAPTER FIVE

Using the sources

Having tracked the source material down, how should the
historian set about using it? This chapter looks at different
approaches that historians adopt: some start out with a specific
set of questions, some follow whatever line of enquiry the sources
themselves throw up. The chapter draws a distinction between
the source critic, who analyses source material in great detail,
and the historian, who does this too but puts the sources in the
context of a wider knowledge of the period to which they relate.
Sources have to be analysed for forgery, the author’s bias has to
be detected and taken account of, and historians need to know
how to spot when material has been removed from the record or
covered up. Sometimes, however, the most revealing approach is
when the historian reads between the lines to draw out the hidden
assumptions and beliefs the author was hardly aware of showing.

I f the historian’s business is to construct interpretations of
the past from its surviving remains, then the implications
of the vast and varied array of documentary sources described in
the previous chapter are daunting. Who can hope to become an
authority on even one country during a narrowly defined time-
span when so much spadework has to be done before the task
of synthesis can be attempted? If by ‘authority’ we mean total
mastery of the sources, the short answer is: only the historian
of remote and thinly documented epochs. It is, for example,
not beyond the capacity of a dedicated scholar to master all the
written materials that survive from the early Norman period in
England. The vicissitudes of time have drastically reduced their
number, and those that survive - especially record sources - tend

epochs

Periods, eras.

vicissitudes

Changes in fortune.

1 20

High Middle Ages

Term usually applied to
the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, often taken
to mark the climax of
medieval society and
culture.

guillotine

Someone who was
executed by guillotine
during the French
Revolution.

journees

Literally 'days'. The term
was applied to moments
of particular drama during
the French Revolution.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

towards the terse and economical. For any later period, however,
the ideal is unattainable. From the High Middle Ages onwards
more and more was committed to paper or parchment, with
ever-increasing prospects of survival to our own day. Since the
beginning of the twentieth century the rate of increase has surged
ahead at breakneck speed. Between 1913 and 1938 the number
of dispatches and papers received annually by the British Foreign
Office increased from some 68,000 to 224,0003 Additions to the
National Archives at present fill approximately 1 mile of shelving
a year. Amid this documentary surfeit, where does the historian
begin?

I

Different approaches to using source material

Ultimately the principles governing the direction of original
research can be reduced to two. According to the first, the histo-
rian takes one source or group of sources that falls within his or
her general area of interest - say the records of a particular court
or a body of diplomatic correspondence - and extracts whatever
is of value, allowing the content of the source to determine the
nature of the enquiry. Recalling his first experience of the French
Revolutionary archives, Richard Cobb describes the delights
offered by a source-oriented approach:

More and more I enjoyed the excitement of research and the
acquisition of material, often on quite peripheral subjects, as ends
in themselves. I allowed myself to be deflected down unexpected
channels, by the chance discovery of a bulky dossier - it might be
the love letters of a guillotine , or intercepted correspondence from
London, or the account-books and samples of a commercial traveller
in cotton, or the fate of the English colony in Paris, or eyewitness
accounts of the September Massacres or of one of the journees. 2

The second, or problem-oriented, approach is the exact opposite.
A specific historical question is formulated, usually prompted by
a reading of the secondary authorities, and the relevant primary
sources are then studied; the bearing that these sources may have
on other issues is ignored, the researcher proceeding as directly
as possible to the point where he or she can present some con-
clusions. Each method encounters snags. The source-oriented
approach, although appropriate for a newly discovered source,

USING THE SOURCES

1 2 1

may yield only an incoherent jumble of data. The problem-
oriented approach sounds like common sense and probably
corresponds to most people’s idea of research. But it is often
difficult to tell in advance what sources are relevant. As will be
shown later, the most improbable sources are sometimes found
to be illuminating, while the obvious ones may lead the historian
into too close an identification with the concerns of the organi-
zation that produced them. Moreover, for any topic in Western
nineteenth or twentieth-century history, however circumscribed
by time or place, the sources are so unwieldy that further selec-
tion can hardly be avoided, and with it the risk of leaving vital
evidence untouched.

In practice neither of these approaches is usually pursued
to the complete exclusion of the other, but the balance struck
between them varies a good deal. Some historians begin their
careers with a narrowly defined project based on a limited
range of sources; others are let loose on a major archive with
only the vaguest of briefs. The former is on the whole the
more common, because of the pressure to produce quick results
that is imposed by the Ph.D. degree - the formal apprentice-
ship served by most academic historians. A great deal of
research - probably the larger part - consists not in ferreting
out new sources but in turning to well-known materials with
new questions in mind. Yet too single-minded a preoccupation
with a narrow set of issues may lead to evidence being taken
out of context and misinterpreted - ‘source-mining’ as one
critic has called it . 3 It is vital, therefore, that the relationship
between the historian and his or her sources is one of give
and take. Many historians have had the experience of setting
out with one set of questions, only to find that the sources
which they had supposed would furnish the answers instead
directed their research on to quite a different path. Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie first turned to the land-tax registers of rural
Languedoc with a view to documenting the birth of capitalism
in that region; he found himself instead investigating its social
structure in the broadest sense, and in particular the impact of
demographic change:

Mine was the classic misadventure; I had wanted to master a source

in order to confirm my youthful convictions, but it was finally the

source that mastered me by imposing its own rhythms, its own

chronology, and its own particular truth . 4

Ph.D.

Doctor of Philosophy. This
is usually obtained after
three years of detailed
archival study resulting in
the production of a thesis
- a carefully argued case
presented in the form of a
short book.

demographic

Concerning changes in
population.

1 2 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

At the very least there must be a readiness to modify the original
objective in the light of the questions that arise directly from the
sources. Without this flexibility historians risk imposing on their
evidence and failing to tap its full potential. The true master of the
craft is someone whose sense of what questions can profitably be
asked has been sharpened by a lifetime’s exposure to the sources
in all their variety. Mastery of all the sources must remain the
ideal, however improbable its complete accomplishment may be.

Benedictine

Of the monastic Order of
St Benedict.

Analysing sources

The reason why the ideal remains for the most part unattainable
is not only that the sources are so numerous but also that each of
them requires so much careful appraisal. For the primary sources
are not an open book, offering instant answers. They may not be
what they seem to be; they may signify very much more than is
immediately apparent; they may be couched in obscure and anti-
quated forms that are meaningless to the untutored eye. Before
the historian can properly assess the significance of a document,
he or she needs to find out how, when and why it came into
being. This requires the application of both supporting knowl-
edge and sceptical intelligence. ‘Records’, it has been said, ‘like
the little children of long ago, only speak when they are spoken
to, and they will not talk to strangers.’ 5 Nor, it might be added,
will they be very forthcoming to anyone in a tearing hurry. Even
for the experienced historian with green fingers, research in the
primary sources is time-consuming; for the novice it can be pain-
fully slow.

Historians have long been aware of the value of primary
sources - and not merely the more accessible sources of a narra-
tive kind. A surprising number of medieval chroniclers showed a
keen interest in the great state documents of the day and repro-
duced them in their writings. William Camden, the leading English
historian in Shakespeare’s generation, was granted access to the
State Papers in order to write a history of Elizabeth I’s reign. But
scholarly source criticism is a much more recent development. It
was largely beyond the historians of the Renaissance, for all their
sophistication. Camden, for example, regarded his record sources
as ‘infallible testimonies’. 6 Many of the technical advances that
underpin modern source criticism were made during the seven-
teenth century - notably by the great Benedictine scholar Jean

USING THE SOURCES

1 2 3

Mabillon. But their application was at first confined to monastic
history and the lives of the saints, and historians continued to
live in a different world from that of the source critic (erudit).
Edward Gibbon, the greatest historian of the eighteenth century,
drew heavily on the findings of the erudits in his Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire (1776-88), but he did not emulate their
methods.

The introduction of a critical approach to the sources into
mainstream history writing was Ranke’s most important achieve-
ment. He owed his early fame and promotion to a merciless
expose of Guicciardini’s faults as a scholar. His appetite for
archival research was truly prodigious. And through his seminar
at the University of Berlin he brought into being a new breed of
academic historians trained in the critical evaluation of primary
sources - and especially the many archival sources that were being
opened to research for the first time during the nineteenth century.
It was with pardonable exaggeration that Lord Acton saluted
Ranke as ‘the real originator of the heroic study of records’. 7

The English historian
Edward Gibbon (1737-943
said that the idea for
writing his famous account
of the Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire
came to him while sitting
one evening in the ruins
of the forum in Rome.
Gibbon started with one
major question - what
caused such a mighty
empire to collapse? -
and he embarked on his
reading of the historical
records with that question
always in view. His
conclusion, that it was
due in large part to the
debilitating effects of
Christianity, was in line
with the radical thinking
of the Enlightenment but
created a storm of public
controversy.

(Bridgeman Art Library/
Private collection)

Lord Acton (1834-1902)

British historian, Regius
(i.e. royal) Professor
of Modern History at
Cambridge. Acton was
formidably learned, and an
obsessive note-taker. He
edited the multi-volume
Cambridge Modern History
but never got round to
writing a major work of
history. It was he who
wrote in a letter that
'power tends to corrupt
and absolute power
corrupts absolutely'.

1 24

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Ranke won acceptance for the idea that the evaluation of sources
and the writing of history must be kept in the same hands. The
spread of Rankean method to Britain came comparatively late;
it was primarily due to William Stubbs, whose reputation rested
not only on his studies of English constitutional history but also
on his scrupulous editing of medieval historical texts. To this day,
what Marc Bloch called ‘the struggle with documents’ is one of
the things that distinguishes the professional historian from the
amateur. 8

II

Is it authentic?

The first step in evaluating a document is to test its authenticity;
this is sometimes known as external criticism. Are the author,
the place and the date of writing what they purport to be? These
questions are particularly relevant in the case of legal documents
such as charters, wills and contracts, on which a great deal could
depend in terms of wealth, status and privilege. During the Middle
Ages many royal and ecclesiastical charters were forged, either to
replace genuine ones that had been lost, or to lay claim to rights
and privileges never in fact granted. The Donation of Constantine,
an eighth-century document that purported to confer temporal
power over Italy on Pope Sylvester I and his successors, was one
of the most famous of these forgeries. Documents of this kind
might be termed ‘historical forgeries’, and detecting them may tell
us a great deal about the society that produced them. But there
is also the modern forgery to be considered. Any recently discov-
ered document of great moment is open to the suspicion that it
was forged by somebody who intended to make a great deal of
money or to run rings round the most eminent scholars of the
day. The Hitler dairies did just that. Extracts of what purported
to be the Fuhrer’s journal were published in a West German
magazine in 1983. Although they appeared to add little of sig-
nificance to our understanding of the Third Reich, being mostly
taken up by lists of official engagements and announcements, the
diaries aroused intense public interest. They were pronounced
genuine by three scholars, including the eminent British historian
Hugh Trevor-Roper, only to be exposed shortly afterwards as a
forgery: forensic texts revealed that both the paper and the ink

USING THE SOURCES

t 2 5

were modern. It later transpired that the forger, who specialized
in Nazi memorabilia, had produced 62 volumes of the ‘diary’ in
five years. 9

Once suspicions are aroused, the historian will pose a number
of key questions. First, there is the issue of provenance; can the
document be traced back to the office or person who is sup-
posed to have produced it, or could it have been planted? In
the case of great finds that suddenly materialize from nowhere,
this is a particularly significant question. Second, the content of
the document needs to be examined for consistency with known
facts. Given our knowledge of the period, do the claims made in
the document or the sentiments uttered seem at all likely? If the
document contradicts what can be substantiated by other primary
evidence of unimpeachable authenticity, then forgery is strongly
indicated. Third, the form of the document may yield vital clues.
The historian who deals mostly in handwritten documents needs
to be something of a palaeographer in order to decide whether the
script is right for the period and place specified, and something of
a philologist to evaluate the style and language of a suspect text.
(It was philological tests that clinched Torenzo Valla’s case against
the Donation of Constantine as early as 1439.) More specifically,
official documents usually conform to a particular ordering of
subject matter and a set of stereotyped verbal formulae, the hall-
marks of the institution that issued them. Diplomatics is the name
given to the study of these technicalities of form. Lastly, historians
can call on the help of technical specialists to examine the mate-
rials used in the production of the document. Chemical testing
can determine the age of parchment, paper and ink; the hand of
the Vinland Map forger was betrayed by microphobe analysis of
the ink, which revealed a substantial percentage of an artificial
pigment unknown before about 1920. 10

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that historians
are constantly uncovering forgeries, or that they methodically
test the authenticity of every document that comes their way.
This procedure is certainly appropriate to certain branches of
medieval history, where much may depend on a single charter of
uncertain provenance. But for most historians - and especially the
modern historian - there is little prospect of a brilliant detective
coup. Their time is more likely to be spent perusing an extended
sequence of letters or memoranda, recording humdrum day-to-
day transactions, which would scarcely be in anyone’s interest

palaeographer

One who studies ancient
writings.

philologist

One who studies the
development of language.

1 26

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

scriptoria (sing.
scriptorium )

(Latin) The writing rooms
of a monastery, where
documents were written
and copied out.

to forge. And in the case of public records under proper archival
care, the possibility of forgery is pretty remote.

For the medievalist some of these skills of detection have
another application - to help in preparing an authentic edition
out of the several corrupt variants that survive today. Before
the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, the only means
whereby books could be circulated was by frequent copying by
hand; for most of the Middle Ages the scriptoria of the monas-
teries and cathedrals were the main centres of book production.
Inevitably errors crept into the copying, and they increased as
each copy was used as the basis of another. Where the original
(or ‘autograph’) does not survive, which is frequently the case
with important medieval texts, the historian is often confronted
by alarming discrepancies among the available versions. This is
the unsatisfactory form in which some of the major chroniclers of
the medieval period have come down to us. However, close com-
parison of the texts - especially their scripts and the discrepancies
of wording - enables the historian to establish the relationship
between the surviving versions and to reconstruct a much closer
approximation to the wording of the original. The preparation
of a correct text is an important part of a medievalist’s work,
requiring a command of palaeography and philology. It is made
easier now that the texts, which may be held by widely scattered
libraries, can be photographed and examined alongside each
other.

Ill

Understanding the text

The authentication of a document and - where applicable -
cleansing the text of corruptions are only preliminaries. The
second and usually much more demanding stage is internal
criticism, that is, the interpretation of the document’s content.
Granted that author, date and place of writing are as they seem,
what do we make of the words in front of us? At one level this is
a question of meaning. This involves more than simply translating
from a foreign or archaic language, difficult though that may be
for the novice trying to make sense of medieval Latin in abbrevi-
ated form. The historian requires not merely linguistic fluency
but a command of the historical context that will show what the

USING THE SOURCES

1 2 7

words actually refer to. Domesday Book is a classic example of
the difficulties that can arise here. It is a record of land use and
the distribution of wealth in the English shires in 1086, before
the institutions of the Anglo-Saxons (and the Danes) had been
much altered by Norman rule; but it was compiled by clerks
from Normandy whose everyday language was French and who
described what they had seen and heard in Latin. Small wonder
that it is not always clear; for example, it is not obvious to what
form of land tenure the term manerium (usually ‘manor’) refers. 11
Nor are our problems solved if we stick to documents written in
English. For language itself is a product of history. Old words,
especially the more technical ones, pass out of currency, while
others acquire a new significance. We have to be on our guard
against reading modern meanings into the past. In the case of the
more culturally sophisticated sources, such as contemporary his-
tories or treatises on political theory, different levels of meaning
may have been embedded in the same text, and this becomes a
major task of interpretation. In coming to terms with the insta-
bility of language, historians have been influenced by recent
developments in literary studies, especially the Postmodernist
preoccupation with theories of language (see Chapter 7).

Is it reliable?

Once historians have become immersed in the sources of their
period and have mastered its characteristic turns of phrase and
the appropriate technical vocabulary, questions of meaning tend
to worry them less often. But the content of a document prompts
a further, much more insistent question: is it reliable? No source
can be used for historical reconstruction until some estimate of
its standing as historical evidence has been made. This question is
beyond the scope of any ancillary technique such as palaeography
or diplomatics. Answering it calls instead for a knowledge of his-
torical context and an insight into human nature. Here historians
come into their own.

Where a document takes the form of a report of what has been
seen, heard or said, we need to ask whether the writer was in a
position to give a faithful account. Was he or she actually present,
and in a tranquil and attentive frame of mind? If the information
was learned at second hand, was it anything more than gossip?
The reliability of a medieval monastic chronicler largely depended

ancillary

Subsidiary, giving help to.

1 28

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

The National Archives at
Kew house all government
records since the Norman
Conquest. They were
moved from a central
London location in the
1970s. Until 2003 the
archives were known as
the Public Record Office.
(Photographers Direct)

on how often his cloister was frequented by men of rank and
power. 12 Did the writer put pen to paper immediately, or after
the sharpness of his or her memory had blurred? (A point worth
bearing in mind when reading a diary.) In reports of oral pro-
ceedings, a great deal may turn on the exact form of words used,
yet prior to the spread of shorthand in the seventeenth century
there was no means of making a verbatim transcript. The earliest
mechanical means of recording speech - the phonograph - was
not invented until 1877. It is extraordinarily difficult to know
exactly what a statesman said in a given speech: if he wrote it out
in advance he may well have departed from his text; and press
reporters, usually armed with only a pencil and note-pad, are
inevitably selective and inaccurate, as can be seen by comparing
the reports given by different newspapers of the same speech. In
the case of speeches in Parliament a reliable verbatim record can
be read, but even this dates back only to the reform of Hansard
in 1909.

USING THE SOURCES

1 2 9

What influenced the author?

What most affects the reliability of a source, however, is the
intention and prejudices of the writer. Narratives intended for
posterity, on which a general impression of the period tends to
be based, are particularly suspect. The distortions to which auto-
biography is subject in this respect are too obvious for comment.
Medieval chroniclers were often extremely partisan as between
one ruler and another, or between Church and state: Gerald of
Wales’s increasing antipathy towards Henry II was due to the
king’s repeated veto on his promotion to the episcopate; Matthew
Paris’s treatment of the disputes between Henry III and the
English barons was slanted by his identification with virtually all
forms of corporate privilege in their dealings with king or pope. 13
Chroniclers were often influenced too by the prejudices char-
acteristic of educated people of their time - a revulsion against
heresy, or a distaste for lawyers and money-lenders. Culture-
bound assumptions and stereotypes shared by virtually all literate
people of the day call for particularly careful appraisal. For the
historian of pre-literate societies, such as those of tropical Africa
in the nineteenth century, the contemporary accounts of European
travellers are a source of major importance, but nearly all of them
were coloured by racism and sensationalism: judicial execution (as
in Ashanti) appeared as ‘human sacrifice’, and polygamy was pre-
sented as a licence for sexual excess. Nor does creative literature
have a special dispensation in this respect. Novelists, playwrights
and poets have as many prejudices as anyone else, and these have
to be allowed for when citing their work as historical evidence.
E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) is, among other things,
a marvellously convincing and very unflattering portrayal of the
British Raj at district level, but some account must surely be taken
of Forster’s own alienation from the kind of stiff-upper-lip public
school man who controlled the administration in India.

The attraction of record sources - of ‘witnesses in spite of
themselves’ (see p. 93) - on the other hand, is that through them
the historian can observe or infer the sequence of day-to-day
events, free from the controlling purpose of a narrator. But this
is merely to eliminate one of the more obvious kinds of distor-
tion. For however spontaneous or authoritative the source, very
few forms of writing arise solely from a desire to convey the
unvarnished truth. Even in the case of a diary composed without

episcopate

The rank of bishop.

Henry III (1207-72)

King Henry III inherited
problems with the English
barons from his father.
King John. Opposition
to Henry was led by
Simon de Montfort
and Stephen Langton,
Archbishop of Canterbury,
and led eventually to the
summoning in 1265 of
the earliest Parliament in
English history.

corporate privileges

The privileges of particular
groups, especially the
barons.

heresy

Deviation from orthodox
religious belief, as
opposed to infidels (the
unfaithful), who hold
to a different religious
belief entirely. Heresy was
punishable by death in
medieval Church courts.

Ashanti

A West African kingdom
in modern-day Ghana. It
was a major power in the
region until the arrival
of the British in the late
nineteenth century. Britain
annexed the Ashanti
kingdom in 1901 .

polygamy

The system whereby one
man is allowed more than
one wife. Although clearly
in evidence in the Old
Testament, it has always
been severely condemned
by the mainstream
Christian churches.

1 30

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

British Raj

British imperial rule in
India, lasting from the
eighteenth century until
1947 .

stiff-upper-lip

The attitude of stoicism
and formality which was
traditionally inculcated
at British public shools
in order to teach boys
to hide their emotions,
especially in the face of
pain or adversity.

accredited

Ambassadors are sent
by the government of
their own country and
accredited - attached
- to the government of
another.

thought of publication, the writer may be bolstering his or her
self-esteem and rationalizing motives. A document that appears
to be a straightforward report of something seen, heard or said
may well be slanted - either unconsciously, as an expression of
deep-seated prejudice, or deliberately, from a wish to please or
influence the recipient. Ambassadors in their dispatches home
may convey a greater impression of bustle and initiative on their
own part than is actually the case; and they may censor their
impressions of the government to which they are accredited in
order to fit them to the policies and preconceptions of their supe-
riors. Historians today are much more sceptical than they used to
be about the claims to objectivity of the great Victorian enquirers
into the ‘social problem’: they recognize that the selection of evi-
dence was often distorted to fit middle-class stereotypes about the
poor and to promote the implementation of pet remedies.

The uses of bias

Once bias has been detected, however, the offending document
need not be consigned to the scrap-heap. The bias itself is likely
to be historically significant. In the case of a public figure it may
account for a consistent misreading of certain people or situations,
with disastrous effects on policy. In published documents with a
wide circulation, bias may explain an important shift in public
opinion. The reports of nineteenth-century Royal Commissions
are a case in point. Newspapers provide other examples: the war
reports of the many British dailies that were opposed to Asquith’s
government in 1915-16 are not a reliable guide to what was
happening on the front, but they certainly help to explain why
the Prime Minister’s reputation at home declined so severely. 14
Autobiographies are notorious for their errors of recall and their
special pleading. But in their very subjectivity often lies their
greatest value, since the pattern that the writer makes of his or
her own life is a cultural as much as a personal construct, and it
also illuminates the frame of mind in which not only the book was
written but the life itself was led. Even the most tainted sources
can assist in the reconstruction of the past.

USING THE SOURCES

1 3 1

Reading sources in their context

As described so far, the evaluation of historical evidence may not
seem to be unlike the cross-examination of witnesses in a court
of law: in both cases the point is to test the reliability of the tes-
timony. But the court-room analogy is misleading if it suggests
that primary sources are always evaluated in this way. Public
records have most often been studied from one of two stand-
points. First, how did the institution that generated the records
evolve over time, and what was its function in the body politic?
And second, how were specific policies formulated and executed?
In this context reliability is hardly the issue, for the records are
studied not as reports (i.e. testimonies of events ‘out there’), but as
parts of a process (be it administrative, judicial or policy-making)
which is itself the subject of enquiry. They are as much the crea-
tion of an institution as an individual, and therefore need to be
examined in the context of that institution - its vested interests,
its administrative routine, and its record-keeping procedures; any
records to do with law or public finance call for technical knowl-
edge of a particularly demanding kind. Considered apart from the
series to which they belong, the records of long-vanished public
institutions are almost certain to be misinterpreted. 15 To under-
stand the full significance of these records the historian must if
possible study them in their original groupings (a principle on the
whole respected in the National Archives) rather than in the rear-
rangement of some tidy-minded archivist. And ideally they should
be studied in their entirety. That means examining together
incoming and outgoing correspondence. Before modern methods
of reproduction, considerable effort was required to make copies
of outgoing letters, and the result is that in many important col-
lections they are completely absent; it is therefore difficult to be
sure how policies were executed, or what pressures contributed to
their genesis. Governments in England did not get on top of this
problem until the late seventeenth century.

Sometimes it makes sense to treat a specific source not as a
witness, but as a historical event in its own right. In the case of a
major public document like Domesday Book, we need to under-
stand how it came into being and what impact it had - by means
of textual analysis, related documents from the same source,
contemporary comment and so on. 16 More recent documents like
the Second Reform Act (1867) or the Balfour Declaration on the

1 3 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

future of Palestine (1917) invite a comparable approach. This
is in effect the procedure now adopted by historians of ideas.
Traditionally their subject was studied to reveal the pedigree of
key concepts, such as parliamentary sovereignty or the freedom of
the individual, through a canon of great theorists down the ages.
This had the unfortunate effect of implying that the great texts
were addressing ‘our’ issues, and thus obscured the contemporary
significance of the sources themselves. But the first task of the
historian is to treat these works like any other document of the
time and to read them, as far as possible, in the specific intellec-
tual and social contexts in which they were written. This means
having regard to both the specific genre - or discourse - to which
the work belonged, and its relation to other genres with which
readers of the time would have been familiar. Scholars such as
Quentin Skinner and J.G.A. Pocock have pointed out that what
contemporaries made of, say, Leviathan (1651) almost certainly
differed from what Thomas Hobbes himself meant to convey. 17
Context is at least as important as text in coming to terms with
an original thinker in the past.

Gaps in the record

Lord Chancellor
Jeffreys (1648-89)

George Jeffreys was
a zealous and deeply
unpopular judge under
Charles II and James II.

He became notorious for
the 'Bloody Assizes' in the
West Country, when he
sentenced 300 people to
death for taking part in
the Duke of Monmouth's
failed rebellion of 1685.

A knowledge of administrative and archival procedures is also
vital if the historian is to be alert to one particularly serious cause
of distortion in the surviving record - the deliberate removal of
evidence. While the planting of a forgery in the official record
presents major difficulties, it may be a comparatively easy matter
to suppress an embarrassing or incriminating document. In the
State Papers, for example, almost all the letters to and from Lord
Chancellor Jeffreys for the reign of James II are missing. Since
Jeffreys himself died in the Tower in 1689 after the Revolution, it
has been surmised that the papers were removed by some person
who had changed sides at the critical moment and stood to gain
by suppressing his connection with the infamous judge of the
‘Bloody Assizes’. 18 In Britain today the centralization of most
government record-keeping at the National Archives - achieved
in the mid-nineteenth century - is an effective check on this kind
of tampering, but it is still possible for the responsible official
to ensure that a sensitive document never leaves the department
in which it was produced. Since total preservation is manifestly
impracticable, there is a recognized procedure for destroying

USING THE SOURCES

1 3 3

ephemeral material judged to be of no historical interest, and
this is open to abuse. 19 For example, a number of Colonial Office
files relating to Palestine in the late 1940s have been destroyed,
presumably in order to cast a veil over British actions during the
turbulent last phase of the mandate administration; it is also likely
that crucial British documents relating to the Suez Crisis of 1956
were destroyed or removed immediately. 20 No doubt there have
been instances of unauthorized censorship that are proof against
detection, but the historian familiar with the administrative pro-
cedures of the department in question is a great deal less likely to
be duped.

Officially published records

While some records have been carefully removed from the his-
torian’s reach, others have been pushed into the limelight. In
several fields of modern history, collections of records published
soon after the time of writing can be consulted. It is important
that these collections should not be accorded special weight just
because they are so accessible. They nearly always represent a
selection, whose publication was intended to further some prac-
tical end, usually of a short-term political nature. The well-known
series of State Trials was for a long time accepted as a reliable
record of some of the major English criminal proceedings since
the sixteenth century. But the first four volumes were promoted in
1719 by a group of propagandists in the Whig cause; as a source
for the great political trials of the Stuart period they are therefore
distinctly suspect. 21 During the nineteenth century the publica-
tion - often on a massive scale - of a politician’s correspondence
was often considered by his family and followers to be a fitting
memorial, but there was usually an element of censorship so that
the less savoury episodes were suppressed and the reputation of
living persons protected or enhanced. Governments of the same
period regarded the publication of select diplomatic correspond-
ence (for example in the British Blue Books) as a legitimate
means of building up public support for their policies; some of
the ‘dispatches’ were composed for this very purpose. In all these
cases the historian will obviously prefer to go to the originals. If
these are not available, the published versions must be scrutinized
carefully, and as much as possible must be found out from other
sources about the circumstances in which they were compiled.

1 34

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

IV

Weighing sources against each other

It will be clear, then, that historical research is not a matter of
identifying the authoritative source and then exploiting it for all it
is worth, for the majority of sources are in some way inaccurate,
incomplete or tainted by prejudice and self-interest. The procedure
is rather to amass as many pieces of evidence as possible from a
wide range of sources - preferably from all the sources that have a
bearing on the problem in hand. In this way the inaccuracies and
distortions of particular sources are more likely to be revealed,
and the inferences drawn by the historian can be corroborated.
Each type of source possesses certain strengths and weaknesses;
considered together, and compared one against the other, there is
at least a chance that they will reveal the true facts - or something
very close to them.

This is why mastery of a variety of sources is one of the hall-
marks of historical scholarship - an exacting one which is by no
means always attained. One of the reasons why biography is often
disparaged by academic historians is that too many biographers
have studied only the private papers left by their subject, instead
of weighing these against the papers of colleagues and acquaint-
ances and (where relevant) the public records for the period.
Ranke himself has been criticized for relying too heavily on the
dispatches of the Venetian ambassadors in some of his writings
on the sixteenth century. Observant and conscientious as most
of them were, the ambassadors saw matters very much from the
point of view of the governing elite. They were also foreigners,
free from local political loyalties, it is true, but lacking a real feel
for the culture of the country to which they were accredited. 22 The
need for primary evidence from ‘insiders’ as well as ‘outsiders’ is
an important guideline for historical research, with wide ramifi-
cations. The failings of Western writers on African history before
the 1960s could be summed up by saying that they relied on the
testimony of the European explorer, missionary and adminis-
trator, without seriously seeking out African sources. 23 Carroll
Smith-Rosenberg recalls that when she started out in nineteenth-
century American women’s history, she found herself portraying
women as victims because she had stuck to the well-thumbed
educational and theological works that men wrote for and about
women; her angle of vision was transformed when she uncovered

USING THE SOURCES

1 3 5

the letters and diaries of ordinary women which documented the
active consciousness of the ‘insider’. 24

Tough standards now tend to be expected of historians
regarding the range of sources they use. In the history of interna-
tional relations, for example, it is a golden rule that both sides of a
diplomatic conversation must be studied before one can be certain
what the subject of the conversation was and which side put its
case more effectively; this is why the inaccessibility of the Soviet
archives prior to the Gorbachev era was so frustrating for Western
historians of the origins of the Second World War. For historians
of government policy in twentieth-century Britain, the temptation
may be to confine research to the public records, because these
survive in such profusion, and their number is increased every
year as more records become available for the first time under the
thirty-year rule (see p. 113). But this method is hardly conducive
to a balanced interpretation. The public records tend to give too
much prominence to administrative considerations (thus reflecting
the principal interest of the civil servants who wrote most of
them) and to reveal much less about the political pressures to
which ministers responded; hence the importance of extending
the search to the press and Hansard, private letters and diaries,
political memoirs and - for recent history - to first-hand oral
evidence. 25

Gorbachev era

Under communist rule
access to state archives
in the Soviet Union was
virtually impossible.
Under Mikhail Gorbachev
archives were opened
to scholars as part of
his policy of glasnost
(openness).

Hidden traces in the records

The examples just discussed - international relations and govern-
ment policy - are topics for which there exists primary source
material in abundance. In each case there is a well-defined body
of documents in public custody, with numerous ancillary sources
to corroborate and amplify the evidence. But there are many
historical topics that are much less well served, either because
little evidence has survived or because what interests us today
did not interest contemporaries and was therefore not recorded.
If historians are to go beyond the immediate concerns of those
who created their sources, they have to learn how to interpret
the sources more obliquely. First, many sources are valued for
information that the writers were scarcely aware they were
setting down and which was incidental to the purpose of their
testimony. This is because people unconsciously convey on paper
clues about their attitudes, assumptions and manner of life which

1 36

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

may be intensely interesting to historians. A given document may
therefore be useful in a variety of ways, depending on the ques-
tions asked of it - sometimes questions that would never have
occurred to the writer or to people of the time. This, of course,
is one reason why beginning research with clearly defined ques-
tions rather than simply going where the documents lead can be
so rewarding: it may reveal evidence where none was thought to
exist. From this point of view, the word ‘source’ is perhaps some-
what inapposite: if the metaphor is interpreted literally, a ‘source’
can contribute evidence to only one ‘stream’ of knowledge. It has
even been suggested that the term should be abandoned altogether
in favour of ‘trace’ or ‘track ’. 26

dedicatory clause

The opening section of a
will, which dedicates the
testator's soul to the care
of Almighty Cod.

mediation of Christ

Catholic theology teaches
that the believer needs
the agency of the Church
in order to go to heaven
after death. Protestants
believe that the death of
Jesus Christ on the cross
provides all the mediation
between Cod and mankind
that is needed, and that a
believer need only believe
in Christ in order to enter
into heaven.

Unwitting evidence

This flair for turning evidence to new uses is one of the distinctive
contributions of recent historical method. It has been most fully
displayed by historians who have moved beyond the well-lit paths
of mainstream political history to fields such as social and cultural
history, for which explicit source material is more difficult to
come by. A case in point is the religious beliefs of ordinary people
in Reformation England. Although the switches of doctrinal alle-
giance among the elite are relatively well recorded, evidence is
very sparse for the rest of the population. But Margaret Spufford
in her study of three Cambridgeshire villages has used the unlikely
evidence of wills to show how religious affiliation changed. Every
will began with a dedicatory clause, which allows some inference
to be drawn concerning the doctrinal preference of the testator
or the scribe. From a study of these clauses, Spufford shows how
by the early seventeenth century personal faith in the mediation
of Christ - the hallmark of Protestant belief - had made deep
inroads among the local people . 27 It was, of course, no part of the
testators’ intentions to furnish evidence of their religious beliefs;
they were concerned only to ensure that their worldly goods were
disposed of in accordance with their wishes. But historians alert
to the unwitting testimony of the sources can go beyond the inten-
tions of those who created them.

Legal history arouses relatively little interest among historians
at present, but court records are probably the single most impor-
tant source we have for the social history of the medieval and
early modern periods, when the vast majority of the population

USING THE SOURCES

1 37

was illiterate and therefore generated no records of its own. This
was how Emmauel Le Roy Ladurie was able to write his micro-
history of Montaillou (see above, p. 82). The bishop who carried
out the Inquisition there intended to root out the Cathar heresy.
But, as ‘a sort of compulsive Maigret’, 28 his meticulous recording
of witnesses resulted in a detailed and salacious record of village
life. As Le Roy Ladurie puts it, the high concentration of Cathar
heretics in Montaillou ‘provides an opportunity for the study not
of Catharism itself - that is not my subject - but of the mental
outlook of the country people’. 29 When historians distance them-
selves from the contemporary significance of a document in this
way, its reliability may be of only marginal significance: what
counts is the incidental detail. In eighteenth-century Lrance it was
the practice for unmarried pregnant women to make statements
to the magistrate in order to pin responsibility on their seducers
and salvage something of their reputations. Richard Cobb carried

Inquisition

Officially known as the
Holy Office, this was the
Catholic Church's legal
department charged with
investigating accusations
of heresy.

Maigret

The painstaking fictional
detective created by
the Belgian crime writer
Georges Simenon
Cl 903-89).

When the Cathar heresy took hold in southern France in the thirteenth century the Church sent the Inquisition to
stamp it out. Centuries later the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie used the Inquisitors' records to build up a
remarkably detailed picture of the intimate lives of the inhabitants of the little mountain village of Montaillou. Le Roy
Ladurie was reading the records with very different priorities from those of the men who originally compiled them.
(Paul Shawcross)

1 38

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Cathar

A form of religious heresy
that spread rapidly in
south-western France in
the thirteenth century.

It is also known as
Albigensianism, from its
centre in the town of
Albi. It held that, since
humans' true home is in
heaven, the world must
be evil. It was seen as
a major doctrinal and
political threat both by the
papacy and by the kings
of France, and was finally
crushed by the Inquisition
and by a ruthless military
campaign known as the
Albigensian Crusade.

out a study of fifty-four such statements made at Lyon in 1790-2,
and as he points out, the identity of the seducers is a trivial issue
compared with the light that is shed on the sexual mores of the
urban poor, their conditions of work and leisure, and the popular
morality of the day. 30 It is studies such as these that demonstrate
the full force of Marc Bloch’s injunction to his fellow historians
to study ‘the evidence of witnesses in spite of themselves’ (see
p. 93).

V

The analysis of statistical evidence

Nothing has been said until now about quantitative data. Does the
precision of numbers not rescue us from the manifold problems
of analysis raised by textual sources? It is sometimes imagined
that the application of quantitative methods displaces the tradi-
tional skills of the historian and calls for an entirely new breed
of scholar. Nothing could be further from the truth. Statistical
know-how can only be effective if it is subject to the normal
controls of historical method. Given the special authority that
figures carry in our numerate society, the obligation to subject
quantitative data to tests of reliability is at least as great as in the
case of literary sources. And once the figures have been verified,
their interpretation and their application to the solution of specific
historical problems require the same qualities of judgement and
flair as any other kind of evidence.

Unreliable statistical evidence

A historian is saved an immense amount of work if he or she is
lucky enough to find a set of ready-made statistics - say a table
of imports and exports or a sequence of census reports. Yet the
reliability of such sources must never be taken for granted. We
need to know exactly how the figures were put together. Were the
returns made by the man-on-the-spot distorted by his own self-
interest - like the tax-collector who understated his takings and
pocketed the difference? Were the figures conjured out of thin air
by a desk-bound official, or totted up by a subordinate who was
not competent in arithmetic? Both these possibilities arise in the
case of impressive-looking statistics published by British colonial

USING THE SOURCES

1 39

Regular ten-year censuses
in Britain started in 1801,
during the Napoleonic
Was. They constitute a
key resource for economic,
social, local and even
family historians; when
the National Archives
put the 1901 census
returns on the web,
demand for access was
so great that the system
immediately crashed. But
how accurate are census
returns? Were respondents
telling the truth? Did
census enumerators make
mistakes? Quantitative
methods cannot tell us.
(CORBIS/Hulton Archive)

administrations in Africa, which were often based on returns
made by poorly educated and underpaid chiefs. How much scope
was there for errors of copying as the figures were passed on from
one level of the bureaucracy to the next? Could the same item
have been counted twice by different officials? Where statistics
were compiled from questionnaires, as in social surveys or the
census, we need to know the form in which the questions were put
in order to determine the scope for confusion on the part of the
respondents, and we have to consider whether the questions - on
income or age, for example - were likely to elicit frank answers.
Only an investigation of the circumstances of compilation, using
the conventional skills of the historian, can provide the answer to
these questions.

Often what interests historians is less a single set of figures
than a sequence over time which enables them to plot a trend. The
figures must accordingly be tested not only for their reliability but
for their comparability. However accurate the individual totals
in such a sequence may be, they can only be regarded as a statis-
tical sequence if they are strictly comparable - if, that is, they are
measuring the same variable. It needs only a slight discrepancy in

1 40

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

occupational schedule

The list of recognised
occupations in the census.
The given occupation of
individuals enumerated
in the census had to
conform to the schedule.
The schedule was defined
differently from one
census to the next.

the basis of assessment to render comparisons null and void. A
classification that seems clear and consistent on paper may be
applied differently over time, or between one place and another,
which is one reason why even today comparative criminal statis-
tics have to be treated so cautiously. In the case of the English
census, the increasing refinement of the occupational schedule in
every count since 1841 means that it is difficult to quantify the
growth and decline of specific occupations. Even the most seem-
ingly straightforward statistical sequences may conceal pitfalls of
this kind. Consider, for example, the official cost-of-living index,
which measures the cost of a typical ‘shopping-bag’ against the
current wage-rate. In Britain the index, begun in 1914, ought
to provide a reliable picture of the declining standard of living
during the Depression of the 1930s. But during the inter-war
period the price side of the index continued to be based on the
same ‘shopping-bag’, even though changing patterns of consump-
tion meant that the weighting given to the various items (fresh
vegetables, meat, clothing, etc.) in 1914 no longer corresponded
with the actual make-up of the average family budget. 31

Compiling the statistics

Most quantitative history, however, is not based on ready-made
statistics. It was only in the late seventeenth century that the
advantages of a statistical approach to public issues began to
be canvassed, only during the nineteenth century that the state
acquired the resources of manpower and money to undertake
such work, and only in the twentieth century that statistical
information was gathered in a really comprehensive way by both
government and private bodies. For most of the questions that
interest historians, the likelihood is that the figures will have to
be laboriously constructed from the relevant surviving materials.
To construct quantitative data in such a way that valid statistical
inferences can be drawn from them is no easy matter. The issues
of reliability and comparability will be posed, not once, but many
times over, as the historian seeks out data from varied and scat-
tered source materials.

For the historian of periods earlier than the nineteenth century,
the problem of selection is likely to have been partly or wholly
solved by the ravages of time. But the residue that survives is still
a sample of the original range of records, and it is important to

USING THE SOURCES

1 41

recognize that it is often anything but a random sample. Some
types of record are more likely to survive than others because their
owners had a greater interest in their survival or better facilities
for preserving them, for reasons that may introduce a manifest
bias into the sample. Thus surviving business records are nearly
always weighted in favour of the successful long-lasting firm, at
the expense of smaller businesses that were unable to weather
a crisis. Lawrence Stone was dogged by a problem of this kind
in his study of the English aristocracy between 1558 and 1641.
Although he had some information on all the 382 individuals who
held titles at that period, the proportion of noble families whose
private papers survive in abundance never rose above one-third,
and these families were mostly those of wealthy earls rather than
minor barons whose estates were more subject to disintegration
or dispersal. Stone was accordingly obliged to make allowances
for the fact that many of his findings were drawn from an unrep-
resentative sample. 32 This is just one of the pitfalls that he in wait
for the historian seeking clarity in quantification.

VI

Methodology and instinct

In approaching the sources, the historian is anything but a passive
observer. The relevant evidence has to be sought after in fairly
out-of-the-way and improbable places. Ingenuity and flair are
required to grasp the full range of uses to which a single source
may be put. Of each type of evidence the historian has to ask how
and why it came into being, and what its real import is. Divergent
sources have to be weighed against each other, forgeries and gaps
explained. No document, however authoritative, is beyond ques-
tion; the evidence must, in E.P. Thompson’s telling phrase, ‘be
interrogated by minds trained in a discipline of attentive disbe-
lief’. 33 Perhaps these precepts hardly merit the name of method,
if that suggests the deliberate application of a set sequence of
scientific procedures for verifying the evidence. Innumerable
handbooks of historical method have, it is true, been written for
the guidance of research students since Ranke’s time, and in main-
land Europe and the United States formal instruction in research
techniques has long been part of the postgraduate historian’s
training. 34 Britain, on the other hand, has until recently been the

1 42

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

home of the ‘green fingers’ approach to source criticism. G.M.
Young, an eminent historian of the inter-war period, declared
that his aim was to read in a period until he could hear its people
speak. He was later echoed by Richard Cobb:

The most gifted researchers show a willingness to listen to the
wording of the document, to be governed by its every phrase and
murmur ... so as to hear what is actually being said, in what accent
and with what tone. 35

This suggests not so much a method as an attitude of mind - an
instinct almost - which can only be acquired by trial and error.

But to argue further, as Cobb did, that the principles of his-
torical enquiry defy definition altogether is a mystification . 36 In
practice, unfavourable notice of a secondary work often turns
on the author’s failure to apply this or that test to the evidence.
Admittedly, the rules cannot be reduced to a formula, and the
exact procedures vary according to the type of evidence; but much
of what the experienced scholar does almost without thinking
can be described - as I have tried to do here - in terms that are
comprehensible to the uninitiated. When spelt out in this way,
historical method may seem to amount to little more than the
obvious lessons of common sense. But it is common sense applied
very much more systematically and sceptically than is usually
the case in everyday life, supported by a secure grasp of his-
torical context and, in many instances, a high degree of technical
knowledge. It is by these taxing standards that historical research
demands to be judged.

Bishop Stubbs’ Select Charters and the British
constitution

The work of the nineteenth-century British historian Bishop
William Stubbs (1829-1901) is an example of the application of
scholarly historical research to contemporary concerns. Stubbs
was Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and later
Bishop of Chester and of Oxford. His compilation of medieval
charters and his three-volume Constitutional History of England
were drawn up to show through exhaustive documentary evidence
the antiquity - and therefore the legitimacy - of English legal and
political institutions. His work is therefore as important nowadays

USING THE SOURCES

1 43

for what it reveals about the Victorian mentality as it is for
understanding the period Stubbs was actually studying.

British rule in Palestine

Palestine, roughly equivalent to modern-day Israel and Jordan,
was a province of the Turkish Ottoman Empire until after the
First World War, when the British took the area over, under
mandate from the League of Nations. However, the British
were also bound by their undertaking under the 1917 Balfour
Declaration to establish a homeland in Palestine for the Jewish
people. Palestinian resistance to Jewish immigration grew
steadily through the 1930s. After the Second World War and the
Holocaust, increasing demands for large-scale Jewish settlement
in Palestine enjoyed considerable international support. Jewish
terrorist groups, Irgun and the Stern Gang, launched a series of
bomb attacks on British troops and administration buildings.
British attempts to create some sort of bi-national Arab-Jewish
state failed, and in 1947 the United Nations (UN) agreed to
partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs. Britain handed
the mandate back to the UN in 1948, and the UN immediately
declared the Jewish state of Israel.

Further reading

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Manchester University Press, 1954.

G. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian, Heinemann, 1967.

G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, Sydney University Press, 1967.

Jacques Barzun & Henry F. Graff, The Modern Researcher, 3rd edn,
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

John Fines, Reading Historical Documents: A Manual for Students,
Blackwell, 1988.

V.H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History, Watts, 1964.

Jacques Le Goff & Pierre Nora (eds), Constructing the Past: Essays in
Historical Methodology, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Edward Higgs, A Clearer Sense of the Census: The Victorian Census
and Historical Research, PRO, 1996.

Stephen Davies, Empiricism and History, Palgrave, 2003.

1 44

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Notes

1 Anthony P. Adamthwaite, The Making of the Second World War,
Allen &c Unwin, 1977, p. 20.

2 Richard Cobb, A Second Identity: Essays on France and French
History, Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 15.

3 J.H. Hexter, On Historians, Allen Lane, 1979, p. 241. The label is
rather unfairly pinned on Christopher Hill.

4 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Langidedoc, Illinois
University Press, 1974, p. 4.

5 C.R. Cheney, Medieval Texts and Studies, Oxford University Press,
1973, p. 8.

6 William Camden, Preface to Britannia (1586), as quoted in J.R. Hale
(ed.), The Evolution of British Historiography, Macmillan, 1967, p. 15.

7 Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History, Fontana, 1960 (first
published in 1906), p. 22.

8 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Manchester University Press,

1954, p. 86.

9 Robert Harris, Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries, Arrow,
1996.

10 Helen Wallis et al., ‘The strange case of the Vinland Map: a
symposium’, Geographical journal, CXL, 1974, pp. 183-214.

11 Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, p. 165; J.J. Bagley, Historical
Interpretation, vol. I: Sources of English Medieval History, 1066-
1540, Penguin, 1965, pp. 24, 29-30.

12 See, for example, the impressive list of informants and contacts in
Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris, Cambridge University Press, 1958,

pp. 11-18.

13 Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c.550 to c.1307,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, pp. 242-5, 367-72.

14 Stephen Koss, Asquith, Allen Lane, 1976, pp. 181-2, 217.

15 Andrew McDonald, ‘Public records and the modern historian’,
Twentieth-Century British History, I, 1990, pp. 341-52.

16 V.H. Galbraith, The Making of Domesday Book, Oxford University
Press, 1964. This approach is commended in T.G. Ashplant and
Adrian Wilson, ‘Present-centred history and the problem of historical
knowledge’, Historical Journal, XXXI, 1988, pp. 253-74.

17 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and understanding in the history of
ideas’, History and Theory, VIII, 1969, pp. 3-53, and J.G.A. Pocock,
Politics, Language and Time, Methuen, 1972, especially ch. 1.

18 G.W. Keeton, Lord Chancellor Jeffreys and the Stuart Cause,
Macdonald, 1965, p. 23.

USING THE SOURCES

1 45

19 Michael Roper, ‘Public records and the policy process in the twentieth
century’, Public Administration, LV, 1977, pp. 153-68.

20 Colin Holmes, ‘Government files and privileged access’, Social
History, VI, 1981, p. 342.

21 G. Kitson Clark, The Critical Historian, Heinemann, 1967, pp. 92-6,
109-14.

22 Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past, Cambridge University Press,
1955, p. 90.

23 J.D. Fage (ed.), Africa Discovers Her Past, Oxford University Press,
1970.

24 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in
Victorian America, Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 25-7.

25 For a fuller discussion, with examples, see Alan Booth and
Sean Glynn, ‘The public records and recent British economic
historiography’, Economic History Review, 2nd series, XXXII, 1979,
pp. 303-15.

26 G.J. Renier, History: Its Purpose and Method, Allen & Unwin, 1950,
pp. 96-105.

27 Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in
the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Cambridge University Press,
1974, pp. 320-44.

28 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a
French Village, 1294-1324, Penguin, 1980, p. xiii.

29 Ibid., p. 231.

30 Richard Cobb, ‘A view on the street’, in his A Sense of Place,
Duckworth, 1975, pp. 79-135.

31 B.R. Mitchell and Phyllis Deane, Abstract of British Historical
Statistics, Cambridge University Press, 1962, p. 466. For an account
of the problems raised by cost-of-living indexes, see Roderick Floud,
An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians, 2nd edn,
Methuen, 1979, pp. 125-9.

32 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641, Oxford
University Press, 1965, p. 130.

33 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, Merlin Press, 1978, pp. 220-1.

34 The classic work is C.V. Langlois and C. Seignobos, Introduction
to the Study of History, Greenwood, 1979, first published in 1898.
Louis Gottschalk, Understanding History: A Primer of Historical
Method, Knopf, 1950, and Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, The
Modern Researcher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 3rd edn, 1977, are
more recent statements.

35 Richard Cobb, Modern French History in Britain, Oxford University
Press, 1974, p. 14.

1 46

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

36 Richard Cobb, ‘Becoming a historian’, in his A Sense of Place,
pp. 47-8. See also Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, Chicago
University Press, 1974, p. 90.

CHAPTER SIX

Writing and interpretation

Most students’ experience of historical writing is limited to
producing essays or assignments, addressing questions and problems
set by others for assessment purposes. Historians, however, are
usually able to set their own questions of the material they have
unearthed, and can plan and design their work as they choose. How,
then, does the historian turn research into historical writing? And
what role does the historian’s interpretation play in the process?

T he application of critical method to the primary sources along
the lines described in the previous chapter generally results
in the validation of a large number of facts about the past with a
bearing on one particular issue, or a group of related issues, but
the significance of this material can only be fully grasped when
the individual items are related to each other in a coherent exposi-
tion. There is nothing obvious or predetermined about the way in
which the pieces fit together, and the feat is usually accomplished
only as a result of much trial and error. Many historians who have
a flair for working on primary sources find the process of compo-
sition excruciatingly laborious and frustrating. The temptation is
to continue amassing material so that the time of reckoning can
be put off indefinitely.

I

Do historians need to write history?

One school of opinion maintains that historical writing is of no real
significance anyway. The intense excitement that such historians

1 48

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Regius Professor

A 'royal' professor
appointed by the crown.
Regius professorships
were introduced in the
eighteenth century as
a means of extending
government control into
the universities of Oxford
and Cambridge.

Domesday Book

The famous survey of
land tenure in England
undertaken on the orders
of King William I in 1086.

experience in contemplating the original documents has led them
to the position that the only historical education worth the name
is the study of primary sources - preferably in their original state,
but failing that in reliable editions. One of the austerest propo-
nents of this view was V.H. Galbraith, a distinguished medievalist
who was Regius Professor at Oxford in the 1950s. Almost all his
published work was devoted to elucidating particular documents
and placing them in their historical context - notably Domesday
Book and the chronicles of St Albans Abbey; he never wrote the
broad interpretative work on fourteenth-century England for
which he was uniquely qualified. As he put it:

What really matters in the long run is not so much what we write
about history now, or what others have written, as the original
sources themselves . . . The power of unlimited inspiration to
successive generations lies in the original sources . 1

There is a certain logic about this purist position. It will evoke
a sympathetic response in all those historians whose research is
source-oriented rather than problem-oriented (see p. 121), many
of whom find it extraordinarily difficult to determine when, if
ever, the time for synthesis has arrived. In history, more than most
other disciplines, undirected immersion in the raw materials has
an intellectual justification. Exposure to original sources ought
to feature in any programme of historical study, and it is entirely
proper that scholarly reputations should continue to be founded
on the editing of these materials. But as a general prescription
Galbraith’s rejection of conventional historical writing is com-
pletely misplaced. It would of course entail an abdication from all
history’s claims to social relevance, which require that historians
communicate what they have learned to a wider audience. But it
would be hardly less disastrous even supposing that these claims
to relevance could be refuted. For it is in the act of writing that
historians make sense of their research experience and bring into
focus whatever insights into the past they have gained. Much sci-
entific writing takes the form of a report expressing findings that
are entirely clear in the scientist’s mind before he or she puts pen
to paper. It is highly doubtful whether any historical writing pro-
ceeds in the same way. The reality of any historical conjuncture as
revealed in the sources is so complex, and sometimes so contradic-
tory, that only the discipline of seeking to express it in continuous
prose with a beginning and an end enables the researcher to grasp

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 49

the connections between one area of historical experience and
another. Many historians have remarked on this creative aspect of
historical writing, which is what can make it no less exhilarating
than the detective work in the archives . 2 Historical writing is
essential to historical understanding, and those who shrink from
undertaking it are something less than historians.

II

The forms of historical writing

Historical writing is characterized by a wide range of literary
forms. The three basic techniques of description, narrative and
analysis can be combined in many different ways, and every
project poses afresh the problem of how they should be deployed.
This lack of clear guidelines is partly a reflection of the great
diversity of the historian’s subject matter: there could not possibly
be one literary form suited to the presentation of every aspect of
the human past. But it is much more the result of the different
and sometimes contradictory purposes behind historical writing,
and above all of the tension that lies at the heart of all historical
enquiry between the desire to re-create the past and the urge to
interpret it. A rough and ready explanation for the variety of his-
torical writing is that narrative and description address the first
requirement, while analysis attempts to grapple with the second.

History as description

That the re-creation of the past - ‘the reconstruction of the his-
torical moment in all its fullness, concreteness and complexity ’ 3
- is more than a purely intellectual task is plain to see from its
most characteristic literary form: description. Here historians are
striving to create in their readers the illusion of direct experience,
by evoking an atmosphere or setting a scene. A great many run-
of-the-mill historical works testify to the fact that this effect is
not achieved by mastery of the sources alone. It requires imagina-
tive powers and an eye for detail not unlike those of the novelist
or poet. This analogy would have been taken for granted by the
great nineteenth-century masters of historical description such as
Macaulay and Carlyle, who were much influenced by contem-
porary creative writers and took immense pains with their style.

1 50

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Modern historians are less self-consciously ‘literary’, but they too
are capable of remarkably evocative descriptive writing - witness
Fernand Braudel’s great panorama of the Mediterranean environ-
ment in the sixteenth century. 4 Whatever else they may be, such
historians are artists, and there are too few of them.

Simon Schama (1945-)

A pupil of the Cambridge
historian J.H. Plumb,
Schama wrote acclaimed
works on the Netherlands
in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries
before coming to general
attention with Citizens, a
highly readable but critical
narrative account of the
French Revolution written
for the bicentennial
celebrations in 1989.
Schama went on to
present a hugely popular
History of Britain for BBC
Television.

History as narrative

Braudel’s work is unusual today for the prominence that it
accords to description. For effective - indeed indispensable - as
such writing is, it cannot express the historian’s primary concern
with the passage of time. Its role has therefore always been
subordinated to the main technique of the re-creative historian:
narrative. In most European languages the word for ‘history’ is
the same as that used for ‘story’ (French, histoire; Italian, storia;
German, Geschicbte). Narrative too is a form the historian shares
with the creative writer - especially the novelist and the epic poet
- and it explains much of the appeal that history has traditionally
enjoyed with the reading public. Like other forms of story-telling,
historical narrative can entertain through its ability to create
suspense and arouse powerful emotions. But narrative is also
the historian’s basic technique for conveying what it felt like to
observe or participate in past events. The forms of narrative that
achieve the effect of re-creation most successfully are those that
approximate most nearly to the sense of time that we experience
in our own lives: whether from hour to hour, as in an account
of a battle, or from day to day, as in an account of a political
crisis, or over a natural life-span, as in a biography. The great
exponents of re-creative history have always been masters of dra-
matic and vividly evocative narrative. To mark the bicentenary of
the French Revolution Simon Schama published an accomplished
narrative history called Citizens (1989), appropriately subtitled
A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Other historians have
represented the great upheavals of the past by means of multiple
narratives, seeing great events through the experience of many
individuals. This technique is employed by Diane Purkiss in her
account of the English Civil War, and by Orlando Figes in his
history of the Russian Revolution: ‘a human event of complicated
individual tragedies’, as he puts it. 5 In works of this kind we can
see the virtues of historical narrative fully exemplified: exact chro-
nology, the role of chance and contingency, the play of irony, and

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 5 1

perhaps most of all the true complexity of events in which the
participants so often foundered.

ill

Historical causes and consequences

But the historian is of course engaged in very much more than an
exercise in resurrection. It would be entirely consistent with this
objective to treat events in the past as isolated and arbitrary, but
the historian does not in fact treat them in this way. Historical
writing is based on the presupposition that particular events are
connected with what happened before, with contemporary devel-
opments in other fields, and with what came afterwards; they are
conceived, in short, as part of a historical process. Those events
which in retrospect appear to have been phases in a continuing
sequence are deemed specially significant by the historian. The
questions ‘What happened?’ and ‘What were conditions like
at such-and-such a time?’ are preliminary - if indispensable
- to asking ‘Why did it happen?’ and ‘What were its results?’
Historical writing based on these priorities may be said to have
begun with the ‘philosophic’ historians of the Enlightenment.
During the nineteenth century it drew further impetus from the
great historical sociologists - de Tocqueville, Marx and Weber -
who sought to explain the origins of the economic and political
transformations of their own day. Questions of cause and con-
sequence have been at the heart of many of the most heated
historical controversies in recent times.

Asking the question ‘Why?’ may simply mean asking why
an individual took a particular decision. Historians have always
given close attention to the study of motive, both because of the
traditional prominence of biography in historical studies and
because the motives of the great are at least partially reflected in
their surviving papers. Diplomatic history is particularly prone to
dwell on the intentions and tactics of ministers and diplomats. But
even in this limited setting, the question ‘Why?’ is less simple than
it looks. However honest and coherent statements of intention
may be, they are unlikely to tell the whole story. Every culture
and every social grouping has its unspoken assumptions - those
nostrums and values that ‘go without saying’ and yet may deeply
affect behaviour. In order to take account of this dimension,

Weber (1864-1920)

Max Weber, German
political philosopher.
Although, like Marx,

Weber stressed the
importance of class
in determining the
development of society,
he put forward a much
more complex and
sophisticated analysis of
what social class actually
consists of. In particular he
stressed the importance of
social status, which might
not equate to strict class
categories and can change
over time.

1 5 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

the historian must be well versed in the intellectual and cultural
context of the period studied, and quick to pick up tell-tale hints
of this context in the documents. With regard to the origins of
the First World War, for instance, James Joll has called attention
to the morbid fear of revolution and the fashionable doctrine of
the survival of the fittest as underlying features of the European
political mind; and he points out that in moments of crisis such
as July 1914 policy-makers were most likely to fall back on their
unspoken assumptions, acting in too great a panic to make a con-
sidered appraisal of their predicament. 6

Beyond human motivation: latent causes,
long-term consequences

However, the really significant questions in history do not turn on
the conduct of individuals but concern major events and collective
transitions that cannot possibly be explained by the sum total of
human intentions. This is because underneath the manifest history
of stated intention and conscious (if unspoken) preoccupation
there lies a latent history of processes that contemporaries were
only dimly aware of, such as changes in demography, economic
structure or deep values. 7 The Victorians saw in the abolition
of slavery in the 1830s a famous victory for humanitarianism,
as exemplified in the campaigning zeal of men such as William
Wilberforce. In retrospect we can see how the legislation of 1833
was also brought about by the declining fortunes of the Caribbean
slave economy and the shift towards an industrialized society in
Britain itself. 8 Because historians can look at a society in motion
through time, they can register the influence of such factors. But
the historical actors themselves could not possibly have a full
grasp of all the structural constraints under which they were
operating.

Nor could they anticipate the outcome of their actions. Like
causes, consequences cannot simply be read off from the stated
motives of the protagonists, for the simple reason that latent or
structural factors so often come between intention and outcome.
As E.H. Carr pointed out, our notion of the facts of history must
be broad enough to include ‘the social forces which produce from
the actions of individuals results often at variance with, and some-
times opposite to, the results which they themselves intended’. 9 To
revert to the issue of slavery, the intention of British abolitionists

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 5 3

was certainly to confer liberty on the slaves and to improve their
material conditions. But the extent of the improvement in prac-
tice varied greatly from one part of the Caribbean to another, in
ways that the humanitarians had not foreseen. Moreover, other
consequences unfolded that lay beyond their terms of reference
altogether, notably the impact of the anti-slavery crusade on the
propaganda techniques of other moral campaigns, such as those
for temperance and social purity. 10 There is a sense in which, from
the viewpoint of posterity, consequences are more significant than
causes, since they usually determine the importance we accord to
a given event. It is a curious fact that vastly more has been written
on the causes of the English Revolution, for instance, than on its
consequences: the extent to which it established a new political
culture, or paved the way for more efficient forms of capitalism,
is far less widely known than, say, the rise of Puritanism or the
financial crises of the early Stuart monarchy.

Multi-layered analysis

The treatment of cause and consequence makes just as heavy
demands on the skill of the writer as historical re-creation does,
but of a rather different kind. To convey the immediacy of lived
experience calls for intricate narrative and evocative descrip-
tion on several different levels. To approximate to an adequate
explanation of past events, on the other hand, requires analytical
complexity. Causation in particular is always multiple and many-
layered, owing to the manner in which different areas of human
experience constantly obtrude on one another. At the very least,
some distinction needs to be made between background causes
and direct causes: the former operate over the long term and
place the event in question on the agenda of history, so to speak;
the latter put the outcome into effect, often in a distinctive shape
that no one could have foreseen. Tawrence Stone has provided
an effective example of a slightly more sophisticated version of
this model. In his hundred-page essay, ‘The causes of the English
Revolution’, he considers in turn the ‘preconditions’ that came
into being in the century before 1629, the ‘precipitants’ (1629-
39) and the ‘triggers’ (1640-2), and thus shows the interaction
of long-term factors, such as the spread of Puritanism and the
Crown’s failure to acquire the instruments of autocracy, with the
role of individual personalities and fortuitous events. 11

Puritanism

A radical form of
seventeenth-century
Protestantism which
sought to 'purify' the
Church of England of
its 'Catholic' features.
Puritanism was also
associated with political
radicalism during the
English Civil Wars.

1 54

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

nostrum

An idea, particularly one
promoted zealously as a
remedy for a problem.

Another way of understanding the task of historical explana-
tion is to see any given conjuncture in the past as lying in a field
where two planes intersect. One plane is vertical (or diachronic),
comprising a sequence through time of earlier manifestations of
this activity: in the case of the abolition of slavery this plane would
be represented by the fifty years of campaigning for abolition
before 1833, and by the ebb and flow of plantation profits over
the same period. The other plane is the horizontal (or synchronic):
that is, the impinging of quite different features of the contempo-
rary world on the matter in hand. In the present example these
might include the political momentum for reform around 1830
and the new nostrums of political economy. Carl Schorske likens
the historian to a weaver whose craft is to produce a strong fabric
of interpretation out of the warp of sequence and the woof of
contemporaneity. 12

The limitations of historical narrative

A.J.P. Taylor (1906-903
became a well-known
figure through his
historical writings for the
popular press and his
television lectures. His
popularity and deliberately
provocative analysis
infuriated historians,
who did not share his
attachment to narrative
history as a format for
historical explanation.
(Topfoto/Topham/
Picturepoint3

This analytical complexity means that narrative is most unlikely
to be the best vehicle for historical explanation. It was certainly

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 5 5

the characteristic mode of Ranke and the great academic histo-
rians of the nineteenth century, who in practice were interested
in much more than ‘how things actually were’. And one of the
most widely read (and readable) professional historians in Britain
- A.J.P. Taylor - hardly wrote anything else. But this traditional
literary technique in fact imposes severe limitations on any sys-
tematic attempt at historical explanation. The placing of events
in their correct temporal sequence does not settle the relationship
between them. As Tawney put it:

Time, and the order of occurrences in time, is a clue, but no more;
part of the historian’s business is to substitute more significant
connections for those of chronology. 13

The problem is twofold: first, narrative can take the reader up a
blind alley. Because B came after A does not mean that A caused
B, but the flow of the narrative may easily convey the impression
that it did. (Logicians call this the post hoc propter hoc fallacy.)
Second, and much more importantly, narrative imposes a drastic
simplification on the treatment of cause. The historical under-
standing of a particular occurrence proceeds by enlarging the
inventory of causes, while at the same time trying to place them
in some sort of pecking order. Narrative is entirely inimical to
this pattern of enquiry. It can keep no more than two or three
threads going at once, so that only a few causes or results will
be made apparent. Moreover, these are not likely to be the most
significant ones, being associated with the sequence of day-to-day
events rather than long-term structural factors. That can have a
markedly impoverishing effect on our understanding of major
structural changes in history. Reflecting on his book Citizens,
Schama acknowledged,

post hoc propter hoc

(Latin) Literally 'after this
therefore because of this'.
In other words the false
assumption that because
two events happen in
sequence there must
necessarily be a causal
connection between them.

The drastic social changes imputed to the [French] Revolution
seem less clear-cut or actually not apparent at all . . . Nor does the
Revolution seem any longer to conform to a grand historical design,
preordained by inexorable forces of social change. Instead it seems a
thing of contingencies and unforeseen circumstances. 14

The logic of narrative is no less clear in the history of war. Writing
about the First World War, Taylor took a characteristically
extreme view. ‘It is the fashion nowadays’, he wrote in 1969,

to seek profound causes for great events. But perhaps the war which
broke out in 1914 had no profound causes. For thirty years past,

1 56

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

international diplomacy, the balance of power, the alliances, and the
accumulation of armed might produced peace. Suddenly the situation
was turned round, and the very forces which had produced the long
peace now produced a great war. In much the same way, a motorist
who for thirty years has been doing the right thing to avoid accidents
makes a mistake one day and has a crash. In July 1914 things went
wrong. The only safe explanation is that things happen because they
happen. 15

C.V. Wedgwood
( 1910 - 97 )

Dame Veronica
Wedgwood, a popular
historian of the English
Civil Wars. Her The King's
Peace and The King's
War are vivid narratives,
written from a viewpoint
sympathetic to, if not
always condoning. King
Charles I.

I'histoire

evenementielle

(French) Events-led, as
opposed to analytical or
descriptive, history.

In putting forward what might be termed the minimalist posi-
tion, Taylor doubtless intended to provoke, but his outlook is
more prevalent than one might suppose. It is implicated in any
attempt to encompass any of the great transformations in history
by narrative means. Neither C.V. Wedgwood nor Simon Schama,
for instance, was much interested in the structural factors predis-
posing England or France to revolution; they wanted to place the
role of human agency and the flux of events in the foreground.
Both of them were reacting against the Marxist approach to
revolution, and traditional narrative suited a perspective that was
fully formed before they embarked on their books. The choice of
narrative must be recognized for what it is: an interpretative act,
rather than an innocent attempt at story-telling.

The limitations of narrative apply still more to institutional
and economic change, where there may be no identifiable pro-
tagonists whose actions and reflections can be treated as a story.
No one has succeeded in representing the causes of the Industrial
Revolution in narrative form. The problems are clearest of all in
the case of the ‘silent changes’ in history 16 - those gradual trans-
formations in mental and social experience which were reflected
on the surface of events in only the most oblique manner. As the
scope of historical studies has broadened in the twentieth century
to include these topics, so the hold of narrative on historical
writing has weakened. Few intellectual rallying cries have proved
more effective than the attack by the Annales school on I’histoire
evenementielle.

The strengths and weaknesses of analytical history

The result is that historical writing is now very much more ana-
lytical than it was a hundred years ago. In historical analysis the
main outline of events tends to be taken for granted; what is at
issue is their significance and their relationship with each other.

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 57

The multiple nature of causation in history demands that the
narrative be suspended and that each of the relevant factors be
weighed in turn, without losing sight of their connectedness and
the likelihood that the configuration of each factor shifted over
time.

This is certainly not the only function of analytical writing.
Analysis can serve to elucidate the connectedness of events and
processes occurring at the same time, and especially to lay bare
the workings of an institution or a specific area of historical expe-
rience. In British historiography the classic instance is Namier’s
Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), a
sequence of analytical essays on the various influences that deter-
mined the composition and working of the House of Commons
around 1760. Structural studies of this kind are most prevalent
in social and economic history, where some grasp of the totality
of the social or economic system is required if the significance of
particular changes is to be fairly assessed. Then there is the critical
evaluation of the evidence itself, which may require a discussion
about textual authenticity and the validity of factual inference, as
well as a weighing up of the pros and cons of alternative inter-
pretations. It has been said of Ranke that his careful evaluation
of contemporary records was seldom allowed to ruffle the surface
of his stately narrative; 17 few historians would be allowed to get
away with that kind of reticence today. But it is in the handling of
the big explanatory issues in history that analysis most comes into
its own. As historical writing becomes more geared to problem-
solving, so the emphasis on analysis has increased, as a glance at
any of the academic journals will show.

However, this does not mean that narrative is completely at
a discount. For undiluted analytical writing raises its own prob-
lems. What it gains in intellectual clarity, it loses in historical
immediacy. There is an inescapably static quality about historical
analysis as if, in E.P. Thompson’s much-cited metaphor, the time
machine has been stopped in order to allow a more searching
inspection of the engine room. 18 Namier’s studies of eighteenth-
century politics lay themselves open to criticism for this very
reason. 19 Furthermore, explanations that seem convincing at an
analytical level may prove unworkable when measured against the
flux of events. The truth is that historians need to write in ways
that do justice to both the manifest and the latent, both profound
forces and surface events. And in practice this requires a flexible

elucidate

To explain something
complex.

1 58

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

use of both analytical and narrative modes: sometimes in alter-
nating sections, sometimes more completely fused throughout the
text. This in fact is the way in which most academic historical
writing is carried out today.

Hayden White (1928-)

American literary
theorist. His views on the
artificiality of constructed
narrative build heavily
on the work of Jacques
Derrida (1930-2004) and
the deconstructionist
school, which held
that text and language
itself is replete with the
hidden assumptions and
prejudices of the author
and of his or her cultural
background.

rhetorical

Rhetoric is the art of
speaking or writing in
order to persuade. It
relies on skilful use of
devices, such as 'rhetorical
questions' (whose answers
are deemed so obvious
that they do not need
to be stated), at least as
much as on the actual
qualities of the argument
itself.

Narrative and the social historian

For all the intellectual appeal of analysis, history without narra-
tive is a non-starter. It is narrative that gives shape and direction
to what would otherwise be a formless incoherent mess, thus
allowing what Daniel Snowman calls ‘the comfort of closure’. 20
Not surprisingly, then, today’s historians are learning new ways
of deploying narrative. Whereas in the nineteenth century it was
often treated, without much reflection, as the mode of historical
exposition, narrative is now the subject of critical scrutiny by
scholars au fait with literary studies. Hayden White, for example,
has emphasized the rhetorical choices made by every historian
who resorts to narrative, and has identified some of the principal
rhetorical stratagems found in their work (see pp. 198-99). 21
Historians tend to be much more self-conscious and critical in their
use of narrative than they used to be. In particular, the traditional
association with political events is now much less evident. Social
historians, in a reversal of their practice a generation ago, now
favour narrative as a means of conveying how the social structures,
life cycles and cultural values that they analyse in abstract terms
were experienced by actual people. But instead of constructing a
narrative for society as a whole, they compose exemplary or illus-
trative stories, perhaps best termed ‘micronarratives’. 22 Richard J.
Evans has written a study of crime and punishment in nineteenth-
century Germany in which each chapter begins with an individual
story as a way into the theme that follows; appropriately he calls
his book Tales from the German Underworld (1998). In a classic
of this new genre, Natalie Zemon Davis recounts the tale of a
peasant in the French Basque country who lived as the husband of
an abandoned wife for three years during the 1550s, until the real
husband turned up and the impostor was exposed and executed.
The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) is an absorbing story, also
made into a film, but for Davis the case ‘leads us into the hidden
world of peasant sentiment and aspiration’, shedding light for
example on whether people ‘cared as much about truth as about
property’. 23 Lawrence Stone was somewhat premature when he

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 59

spoke in 1979 of a ‘revival of narrative’, but the last three decades
have confirmed that historians are indeed breathing new life into
the most traditional form of historical writing. 24

IV

Writing up research: the academic monograph

These problems of choice of form are usually confronted for the
first time by the practising historian in the form of the mono-
graph - that is, the writing up of a piece of original research,
initially as a thesis for a higher degree and then as a book or an
article in one of the learned journals. In this kind of writing the
complexities of the evidence are likely to be displayed in the text,
and the statements made there validated by meticulous footnote
references to the appropriate documents. Many monographs are
highly technical and are hardly accessible to anyone but fellow
specialists. And, since the essence of the monograph is that it
is based on primary rather than secondary sources, its scope is
likely to be very restricted. This is particularly so in the case of a
young scholar presenting the results of three or four years’ Ph.D.
research. Although in a technical sense such works are ‘an original
contribution to knowledge’ (as required under the regulations
for higher degrees), their significance is often slight. The pressure
to complete an acceptable thesis within a few years in order to
secure an academic job often causes the researcher to play safe
by focusing on a well-defined body of sources never previously
studied - or at any rate not with the same historical problem in
mind. Lucien Febvre caustically observed the tendency for most
historical works to be written by people who ‘simply set out to
show that they know and respect the rules of their profession’. 25
That is doubtless an unavoidable consequence of the profes-
sionalization of history. At the same time, arresting results do
from time to time emerge from postgraduate research: Michael
Anderson’s Family Structure in Nineteenth -Century Lancashire is
still regarded as an important source of demographic information
on the working class, even though it was published nearly forty
years ago. Part of the explanation is that in 1971 the history of the
family was a new field. The apprentice historian stands a much
better chance of making a major contribution where existing
interpretations are thin on the ground. At the very least, the Ph.D.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

provides a training in the conduct of research and the writing of
monographs, and it is by these means that the stock of properly
validated historical knowledge is extended.

Archbishop Laud
( 1573 - 1645 )

William Laud, Archbishop
of Canterbury under
King Charles I. Laud was
a controversial choice,
suspected of wanting
to reintroduce Catholic
practices into the Church
of England and, even
more controversially,
into the Scottish Kirk.
Scottish resistance to
Laud's religious policies
precipitated the crisis that
developed into the English
Civil War. Laud was
arrested and impeached in
1 641 , and finally executed
by order of Parliament.

Fashoda Crisis

A diplomatic crisis
between Britain and
France in 1898 over
control of the southern
Sudan, which for a time
threatened to push the
two countries into war. A
British military expedition
which had conquered
the northern Sudan
encountered a much
smaller French exploratory
mission, which tried
unsuccessfully to claim the
country for France.

Taking the broader view

Yet if historians confined their writings to those topics for which
they have mastered the primary sources, historical knowledge
would be so fragmented as to be meaningless. Making sense of
the past means explaining those events and processes that appear
significant with the passage of time and that are inevitably defined
in terms which are broader than any researcher can encompass
by his or her own unaided efforts: the origins of the English Civil
War rather than the policies of Archbishop Laud, the social con-
sequences of the Industrial Revolution rather than the decline of
the handloom weavers of the West Riding, the Scramble for Africa
rather than the Fashoda Crisis. It must be obvious that an under-
standing of topics of this complexity is not attained by the mere
accumulation of detailed researches. In Marc Bloch’s words, ‘The
microscope is a marvellous instrument for research; but a heap of
microscopic slides does not constitute a work of art ’. 26 When his-
torians step back to take an overview of one of these topics, they
face much more acute problems of interpretation - of combining
many strands into a coherent account, of determining the weight
of this factor or that. And even after a lifetime of research in the
relevant primary sources, which may allow them to be discrimi-
nating in the use they make of other scholars, they will still have
to take much of their work on trust.

The grand sweep of history

These difficulties are compounded when the historian steps still
further away from the moorings of his or her first-hand research
and attempts a comprehensive survey of an entire epoch. If a mon-
ograph is a secondary source, the survey can fairly be described as
a ‘tertiary’ source, since the writer is inevitably placed in the posi-
tion of making emphatic statements about topics based on no more
than a reading of the standard secondary authorities. Nitpicking
criticism by the specialists whose fields have been trespassed upon
is the inevitable result. Works of this kind will be much more
vulnerable to the vagaries of fashion, and their judgements will

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1 61

be overtaken by new research much more quickly than those of
the narrowly conceived monograph. The academic standing of
the synthesis by a single hand is further compromised by the sad
truth that many are not true syntheses at all but textbooks which
for ease of reference summarize the state of knowledge in a rigidly
compartmentalized and mechanical fashion. Some historians,
conscious that their claims to professional expertise are most
convincingly demonstrated in the evaluation of primary sources,
feel instinctively that this is no work for ‘real scholars’. 27 Others
have sought to meet the demand for surveys by participating in
collaborative histories. The prototype was the Cambridge Modern
History, planned under the supervision of Lord Acton in 1896
and covering European history since the mid-fifteenth century in
twelve volumes, each composed of national and thematic chapters
by the leading authorities. Since then collaborative histories have
proliferated. Yet, invaluable though they may be as concise state-
ments of specialist knowledge, such compilations evade the issue.
However like-minded the contributors and however forceful the
editor, a consistency of approach cannot be attained, and the
themes that cut across the specialist concerns of the contributors
are completely omitted.

The wide-ranging survey by a single historian fulfils several
vital functions. First, it is at its best a fertile source of new
questions. Unremitting primary research, with its necessary but
obsessive attention to detail, can lead to a certain intellectual
blinkering: ‘the dust of archives blots out ideas’, as Acton rather
unkindly put it. 28 The historian who takes time off from the
records to survey an extended period is much more likely to detect
new patterns and new correlations which can later be tested in
detailed research. E.J. Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution (1962),
still unsurpassed as a survey of Europe from 1789 to 1848 under
the twin impact of the French Revolution and the Industrial
Revolution, positively bristles with arresting juxtapositions which
no historian confined to a single country could have entertained.
By selecting the period 1870-1914 for her survey of English
social history, Jose Harris was able to show how many of the
late twentieth century’s preoccupations originated in her chosen
period (the labour movement, feminism and religious doubt being
just some of the themes she covers). 29 In a new field where major
issues of interpretation have scarcely been formulated, this kind of
stock-taking can yield rich dividends, particularly when there is a

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Haute vulgarisation

(French) Making popular
from on high. A play on
the association of haute
(high) with such exclusive
pursuits as haute cuisine
or haute couture.

tendency to proceed initially by the accumulation of case studies.
This has been notably true of the history of mentalities and the
history of the colonial impact on Africa, to take just two exam-
ples. The dangers of fragmentation are obvious. There must come
a point when the historian considers the individual cases together,
so that a new landscape of continuity, change and contradiction
can be discerned and a new agenda laid out.

Second, the grand survey is the principal means by which his-
torians fulfil their obligations to the wider public. Popular interest
in the writings of academic historians is by no means confined to
survey works - witness the success of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s
Montaillou (1976). But the appeal of this book is primarily of a
re-creative kind. If historians are to succeed in communicating
their understanding of historical change and of the connectedness
of past and present, then it is through the ambitious overview that
they will do it. Many historians, intent on preserving their aca-
demic standing at all costs, are unduly oppressed by the dangers
of superficiality and outright error, and there is much snobbish
disparagement of those who write for the general reader. But it is
not impossible to combine sound scholarship with a lay appeal.
Haute vulgarisation , as Hobsbawm describes his own highly
distinguished ventures in this field, 30 is a necessary skill of the
historian.

The march of history

Lastly, the large-scale synthesis raises questions of historical
explanation which are profoundly important in their own right
and which are beyond the scope of anything less ambitious.
History is a ‘progressive’ subject in the sense that few people con-
templating the past with the benefit of hindsight can fail to ask
themselves in what direction events were moving. This question
is not a matter of metaphysical speculation but rather a recogni-
tion that fundamental areas of human experience are subject to
cumulative change over time. The issue may be evaded in studies
confined to a short time-span, but it is central to any attempt to
make sense of a whole era: can one detect increasing occupational
specialization, or enlargement of social scale, or an expansion in
the scope of government, or greater freedom of belief and expres-
sion - or any of these trends in reverse? Alternatively, to adopt a
less incremental view of the historical process, a given period may

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 63

be seen rather in terms of discontinuity and disjuncture, where
new circumstances force a break with the inherited tendencies of
the past. That is the implication, for example, of using the label
‘the New Imperialism’ to refer to European expansion towards
the end of the nineteenth century. 31 Consideration of an extended
period raises problems of historical interpretation of a different -
and surely more significant - order than those that crop up in the
study of a well-defined episode.

Historical synthesis

One consequence of the immense expansion in the scope of his-
torical enquiry that has taken place in the past hundred years
is that our definition of a ‘comprehensive’ survey is much more
demanding than that of the great nineteenth-century masters: it
includes both the giddy passage of ‘events’ and the material and
mental conditions of life which in many periods - and certainly
in the pre-industrial world - changed very slowly if at all, and yet
constrained what people could do or think. G.R. Elton’s affirma-
tion that ‘history deals in events, not states; it investigates things
that happen and not things that are’ 32 is a questionable half-truth.
How surface and background - or events and ‘structure’ - are
related is central to any understanding of historical process, as
we have seen already. The large body of writing inspired by the
Marxist tradition can be interpreted as one manifestation of this
concern (see Chapter 8), but it is the Annales school that has
confronted the problem most directly, and Fernand Braudel more
than anyone else. ‘Is it possible’, he asks,

New Imperialism

Historians have seen
the drive for European
overseas expansion in the
late nineteenth century
as marking a distinctively
assertive phase in the
development of empire,
different from the slower
and more piecemeal
expansion of previous
decades. The 1880s and
1 890s have therefore been
termed the period of 'New
Imperialism'.

somehow to convey simultaneously both that conspicuous history
which holds our attention by its continual and dramatic changes -
and that other, submerged history, almost silent and always discreet,
virtually unsuspected either by its observers or its participants, which
is little touched by the obstinate erosion of time ? 33

The plurality of social time

For Braudel the root of the difficulty lies in the conventional
historian’s idea of unilinear time - that is, a single time-scale
characterized by continuity of historical development. Because
of the historian’s emphasis on the documents and the aspiration
to get inside the minds of those who wrote them, this time-scale

1 64

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

can hardly be other than a short-term one which registers the
sequence of events to the exclusion of structure. Braudel’s solu-
tion is to jettison unilinear time altogether and to introduce
instead the ‘plurality of social time ’ 34 - the notion that history
moves on different planes or registers, which can for practical
purposes be reduced to three: the long term (la longue duree),
which reveals the fundamental conditions of material life, states
of mind and above all the impact of the natural environment; the
medium term, in which the forms of social, economic and political
organization have their life-span; and the short term, the time
of the individual and of I’histoire evenementielle. The problem,
which Braudel himself did not solve in The Mediterranean, is
how to convey the coexistence of these different levels in a single
moment of historical time - how to elucidate their interaction
in a coherent exposition which incorporates different levels of
narrative, description and analysis. This is an issue about which
contemporary historians are much more keenly aware than their
predecessors; it is perhaps the most fundamental that they face.

feudal relations

The system in medieval
England whereby social
position was determined
by a person's relationship
to the land. Land was
always 'held' (hence
'tenure') from someone
else, usually - though not
always - a social superior.
Ultimately all land was
held from the Crown.

plantation slavery

The predominant crops
grown in the southern
states of the nineteenth-
century United States
were tobacco and cotton.
The most economically
efficient way to farm them
was in large plantations
worked by African slave
labour, hence 'plantation
slavery'.

V

Comparative history

Problems of time-scale and time-depth are most often explored by
scholars working on a single society. But historical explanation
and historical exposition also have to come to terms with the fact
that the experience of a given society in the past was never entirely
distinctive: it shared features with other societies of similar type,
sometimes with societies that were physically far removed. In other
words, lurking behind the statements we make about, say, feudal
relations in twelfth-century England, or plantation slavery in the
nineteenth-century United States, is an implied comparison - in
the first case with the feudal societies of Western Europe, in the
second case with the slave societies of the Caribbean and Brazil.
Such comparisons can have an important bearing on historical
understanding. If, for example, slavery is viewed as an essentially
uniform institution reflecting both a common culture of racism and
a particular stage in the development of capitalist relations of pro-
duction, then the version which prevailed in the United States will
seem much less of a ‘peculiar institution’, and the contingencies of
the American scene will have much less explanatory significance.

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 65

This explains the appeal of comparative history. It can be
defined as the systematic comparison of selected features in two or
more past societies that are normally considered apart. It requires
mastery of at least two national contexts: bringing together
a number of free-standing national studies into the covers of
an edited volume does not qualify. The merits of comparative
history have most often been demonstrated by closely focused
comparisons over a short time span. For example Susan Grayzel
has sought to understand the impact of the First World War on
understandings of gender by comparing Britain and France; her
conclusion is that the implications for women of involvement in
the war were essentially the same in both countries, despite their
divergent national cultures. By contrast, the welfare historian
Susan Pedersen’s Anglo-French perspective brings to light quite
different public strategies for supporting families during the war
and the inter-war period . 35 Closely defined by period and topic, it
is usually expected that such studies should be based on primary
sources in both societies. In the case of well-documented nations
like Britain and France that is no small commitment.

But the ambitions of comparative history go further.
Comparison is no less illuminating when applied to trajectories of
national development or social change over an extended period.
The difference is that it is even harder to accomplish, and the
number of successful large-scale comparative histories is therefore
small. A recent tour de force is J.H. Elliott’s study of the British
and Spanish empires in the Americas over their entire history of
three centuries. Britain’s North American colonies and the Spanish
dependencies in Central and South America have generally been
viewed as very different enterprises. Elliott’s research uncov-
ered further differences. He likens doing comparative history to
playing the accordion:

The two societies under comparison are pushed together, but only
to be pulled apart again. Resemblances prove after all not as close as
they look at first sight; differences are discovered which at first sight
lay concealed . 36

Part thematic comparison, part parallel narrative, part all-
encompassing synthesis: history of this complexity makes heavy
demands on both the research skills and the powers of compo-
sition of the writer. The comprehensive primary research that
would be expected of the conventional monograph is not feasible;

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Dr Johnson (1709-84)

Samuel Johnson, English
writer and lexicographer,
best known for having
produced the world's first
dictionary of the English
language. Johnson was
given to pithy comments,
which still lend themselves
to quotation. He was the
subject of an extensive
biography by his friend
James Boswell.

Elliott makes extensive use of quotations from published primary
sources such as travel literature and diaries, but his interpreta-
tion rests primarily on a phenomenal range of secondary works.
The comparative approach is sometimes applied in a mechanical
compartmentalised fashion. Elliott’s treatment is freer, ‘constantly
comparing, juxtaposing and interweaving the two stories’. 37

Comparative history remains a minority pursuit among histo-
rians, but it is an essential means of deepening our understanding
of the past. Always to work within the boundaries of a single
society is to deprive oneself of a critical angle of vision. Local
developments can be mistakenly treated as unique, and the signifi-
cance of variations from the norm can be overlooked; as Elliott
himself has remarked, ‘the besetting sin of the national historian
is exceptionalism’. 38 At the very least comparative history offers
an important corrective to such blinkered parochialism. In some
cases it opens up the possibility of a new line of analysis. Space,
as well as time, defines the nature of historical enquiry.

VI

The qualities of a historian

What qualities does the successful practice of history call for?
Outside observers have often taken an unflattering view. Probably
the most famous put-down of the profession ever written was

Dr Johnson’s:

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical
composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.
He has the facts ready to hand so there is no exercise of invention.
Imagination is not required in any high degree; only about as much as
is used in the lower forms of poetry. 39

This was hardly fair comment even in Johnson’s day, and in the
light of the development of the profession since the eighteenth
century it seems even less apt. For the truth is that the facts do
not lie ready to hand. New facts continue to be added to the body
of historical knowledge, while at the same time the credentials
of established facts are subject to constant reassessment; and, as
Chapters 4 and 5 showed, the defective condition of the sources
renders this dual enterprise far more difficult than might appear
at first sight. The training of academic historians instituted in
the nineteenth century was - and still is - primarily intended to

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 67

disabuse them of any notion that the facts can be apprehended
without effort. The qualities most emphasized in manuals of
historical method are accordingly mastery of the primary sources
and critical acumen in evaluating them.

But these skills can only take the historian one stage along
the road. The process of interpretation and composition suggests
a number of other equally essential qualities. First, the historian
has to be able to perceive the relatedness of events and to abstract
from the mountains of detail those patterns that make best sense
of the past: patterns of cause and effect, patterns of periodiza-
tion that justify such labels as ‘Renaissance’ or ‘medieval’, and
patterns of grouping that make it meaningful to speak of a petit
bourgeoisie in nineteenth-century France or ‘rising gentry’ in early
seventeenth-century England. The more ambitious the scope of
the enquiry, the greater the powers of abstraction and conceptu-
alization required. The small number of really satisfying syntheses
on the grand scale is a measure of how rare a generous endow-
ment of these intellectual qualities is.

Imagination

As well as an intellectual cutting edge, the historian also requires
imagination. This term can easily lead to confusion in the context
of historical writing. It is not intended to convey the idea of
sustained creative invention, though it was evidently against this
yardstick that Dr Johnson found historians wanting. The point
is rather that any attempt to reconstruct the past presupposes
an exercise of imagination, because the past is never completely
captured in the documents which it left behind. Again and again
historians encounter gaps in the record which they can fill only
by being so thoroughly exposed to the surviving sources that they
have a ‘feel’ or instinct for what might have happened. Matters
of motive and mentality frequently fall into this category, and
the more alien and remote the culture the greater the imagina-
tive leap required to understand it. Those books condemned as
‘dry as dust’ are usually the ones in which the accumulation of
detail has not been brought to life by the play of the writer’s
imagination.

How is the historical imagination nurtured? It helps, of course,
to keep your eyes and ears (and nostrils) open to the world around
you. As Richard Cobb found:

petit bourgeoisie

Bourgeois simply means
'of the town' and is
therefore applied to those,
principally the 'middle'
classes, whose sphere of
operation is urban rather
than rural. However,
since this ranges from the
wealthy merchant and
professional classes down
to small shopkeepers, the
term needs to be qualified.
Bourgeoisie is usually
reserved for substantial
businessmen and those in
the professions, while petit
bourgeoisie ie (the 'little'
bourgeoisie, sometimes
rendered as 'petty
bourgeois' in English!
refers to shopkeepers and
small businessmen.

1 68

muse

In Creek mythology, the
muses were the daughters
of Zeus and Mnemosyne,
the goddess of memory.
Each presided over a
particular branch of
knowledge and the arts,
such as music, poetry,
comedy and mime. The
muse of history was Clio.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

A great deal of Paris eighteenth-century history, of Lyon nineteenth-
century history can be walked, seen, and above all heard, in small
restaurants, on the platform at the back of a bus, in cafes, or on the
park bench . 40

The historian’s knowledge of life

The ability to empathize with people in the past presupposes a
certain self-awareness, and some historians have gone so far as
to suggest that psychoanalysis might form part of the appren-
tice’s training . 41 Breadth of experience, however, is a much more
promising foundation. In the days when history writing was
largely confined to political narrative, experience of public life
was widely regarded as the best training for historians; as Gibbon
said of his short career as an MP: ‘The eight sessions that I sat
in parliament were a school of civil prudence, the first and most
essential virtue of an historian ’. 42

Wartime service probably deepened the insights of many
twentieth-century historians of politics, diplomacy and war. But
it is variety of experience that really tells - experience of different
countries, classes and temperaments - so that the range of imagi-
native possibilities in the historian’s mind bears some relation to
the range of conditions and mentalities in the past. Unfortunately
the usual career pattern of academic historians nowadays makes
little allowance for this requirement. A suggestion some years ago
that the best training for a historian is a trip round the world and
several jobs in different walks of life may have been impracticable,
but it was not meant to be flippant . 43

It is one thing, however, to have an imaginative insight into
the past, and quite another to be able to convey this to the reader.
Verbal or literary skills are of considerable importance to the
historian. At any time prior to the nineteenth century this would
have been taken for granted. Since classical times the profession
of historian had been considered by its leading exponents to be
above all a literary accomplishment. History had its presiding
muse (Clio), a secure place in the culture of the reading public,
and a range of rhetorical and stylistic conventions which it was the
principal task of the aspirant historian to master. All this changed
with the rise of academic history. The problems that exercised
the professional historians who followed in Ranke’s footsteps
were those of method rather than presentation. Command of the

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 69

sources or ‘scholarship’ has often been counterposed to ‘writing’,
to the detriment of the latter; ‘Clio, once a Muse, is now more
commonly seen, with a reader’s ticket, verifying her references at
the Public Record Office ’. 44 As a result a great deal of unreadable
history has been written in the last hundred years.

But good writing is more than an optional extra or a lucky
bonus. It is central to the re-creative aspect of history. The
insights derived from the exercise of historical imagination cannot
be shared at all without a good deal of literary flair - an eye for
detail, the power to evoke mood, temperament and ambience, and
an illusion of suspense - qualities that are most fully developed
in creative writing. History of the explanatory kind does not
share so much common ground with creative literature, which
may be one reason why those historians who set most store by
the literary claims of their discipline - G.M. Trevelyan or C.V.
Wedgwood, for example - have contributed relatively little to this
sphere. Close argument and the need to hedge so many statements
with qualifications and caveats are not conducive to ‘literary’

In classical mythology
Clio was the muse who
inspired historians, just as
other muses inspired poets
and musicians, etc. When
Clio is invoked today, the
implication is that history
is one of the literary arts
and should be judged by
aesthetic standards,
(akg-images, Londonj

1 7 0

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

expression. Nevertheless, the problem of combining narrative
with analysis which attends any venture in historical explanation
is essentially a problem of literary form. Its solution is hardly ever
dictated by the material.

Set out in this way, it may be that none of the qualities or skills
required of the historian seems particularly demanding. But it is
rare to find all of them combined in sufficient measure in the same
person. Very few historians are equally endowed in the technical,
intellectual, imaginative and stylistic spheres, and despite the
immense expansion of professional scholarship in recent decades,
the number of fully satisfying historical works in any branch of
study remains small. At the same time, the varied nature of the
historian’s equipment serves to reiterate another point - that
history is essentially a hybrid discipline, combining the technical
and analytical procedures of a science with the imaginative and
stylistic qualities of an art.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59)

Alexis de Tocqueville was a French lawyer, historian and social
commentator. His 1835 study of Democracy in America argued
that although Americans enjoyed greater liberty than Europeans,
their liberty led to oppression of the poor by the materialistic rich
on a much greater scale than was to be found in the monarchies
of Europe. De Tocqueville was a staunch libertarian and opponent
of the centralizing tendencies of bureaucratic government; he was
Foreign Minister in the short-lived second French Republic (1849-
52) but refused to serve under the autocratic government of Louis
Napoleon (Emperor Napoleon III from 1852). His classic study
of The Ancien Regime and the French Revolution argued that the
Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire that followed it merely
continued the oppressive, centralizing tendencies of the Bourbon
regime. He also taught that an oppressive regime is at its most
vulnerable precisely at the moment when it begins to reform itself.

Origins of the First World War

The causes of the First World War (1914-18) have long proved
a fruitful source of historical controversy. The wartime allies
concluded that Germany was directly to blame and drew up the
draconian Treaty of Versailles on that basis; German resentment
at this helps to explain popular support for Hitler. By the 1960s

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 71

most historians were more prepared to explain the outbreak of
the war in terms of the complex interplay of political, diplomatic,
military, social and personal factors. However, the German
historian Professor Fritz Fischer broke this consensus by arguing
that German diplomatic correspondence showed that the German
government had indeed been planning for war and was largely
to blame for it. The British historian A.J.P. Taylor argued
provocatively that in the end the crucial factor was that each
state’s railway timetables were so rigid that it was impossible for
even the most powerful government, once orders had been given
for troops to move, not to invade its neighbours. Few modern
historians share Taylor’s extreme view, but the Fischer thesis still
retains a substantial body of support.

The abolition of slavery

The campaign against the transatlantic slave trade began among
evangelical Christians in late eighteenth-century England and
pioneered many of the features of modern pressure groups. The
movement’s most important convert was William Wilberforce,
Tory MP for Hull and a close friend of the Prime Minister,
William Pitt the Younger. Despite support from Pitt and the
Opposition leader, Charles James Fox, it took until 1807 to
persuade Parliament to outlaw the slave trade, and till 1833 to
abolish slavery itself. Illiterate and without skills, thrown into a
job market in which they could earn only the lowest wages, many
former slaves were reduced to penury.

Further reading

G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, Fontana, 1969.

William Lamont (ed. ), Historical Controversies and Historians, UCL
Press, 1998.

Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Polity Press,
1991.

L.P. Curtis (ed.), The Historian’s Workshop, Knopf, 1970.

Bernard Bailyn, ‘The challenge of modern historiography’, American
Historical Review, LXXXVII, 1982.

W.H. Walsh, ‘Colligatory concepts in history’, in Patrick Gardiner (ed.),
The Philosophy of History, Oxford University Press, 1974.

1 72

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, Routledge, 1997.

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-
Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

Notes

1 V.H. Galbraith, An Introduction to the Study of History, C. Watts,
1964, p. 80.

2 See, for example, E.H. Carr, What is History ?, Penguin, 1964,
pp. 28-9, and J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Working on ideas in time’, in L.P.
Curtis (ed.), The Historian’s Workshop, Knopf, 1970, pp. 161, 175.

3 H. Butterfield, History and Human Relations, Collins, 1951, p. 237.

4 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in
the Age of Philip II, 2 vols, Collins, 1972.

5 Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History, Harper,
2006; Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution,
1891-1924, Jonathan Cape, 1996, p. xix.

6 James Joll, ‘The unspoken assumptions’, in H.W. Koch (ed.), The
Origins of the First World War, Macmillan, 1972.

7 For an excellent discussion of this notion, see Bernard Bailyn, ‘The
challenge of modern historiography’, American Historical Review,
LXXXVII, 1982, pp. 1-24.

8 The classic statement of this viewpoint is Eric Williams, Capitalism
and Slavery, University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

9 Carr, What is History ? p. 52.

10 Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion and
Reform, Dawson, 1980 (especially the essay by Brian Harrison).

11 Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972, ch. 3.

12 Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture,
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, p. xxii.

13 R.H. Tawney, History and Society, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978,
p. 54.

14 Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution,
Penguin 1989, p. xiv.

15 A.J.P. Taylor, War by Timetable: Hoiv the First World War Began,
Macdonald, 1969, p. 45.

16 R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, Hutchinson, 1953,
pp. 14-15.

17 Agatha Ramm, ‘Leopold von Ranke’, in John Cannon (ed.), The
Historian at Work, Allen &c Unwin, 1980, p. 37.

WRITING AND INTERPRETATION

1 73

18 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory , Merlin Press, 1978, p. 85.

19 H. Butterfield, George III and the Historians, Collins, 1957.

20 Daniel Snowman, Histories, Palgrave, 2007, pp. 10-11.

21 Hayden White, Metahistory, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.

22 Peter Burke, ‘History of events and the revival of narrative’, in

P. Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing, Polity Press,
1991, p. 241.

23 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Gtterre, Penguin, 1985,
pp. 4, viii.

24 Lawrence Stone, ‘The revival of narrative’, 1979, reprinted in his The
Past and the Present Revisited, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.

25 Lucien Febvre, ‘A new kind of history’, 1949, translated in Peter
Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973,
p. 38.

26 Marc Bloch in Annales, 1932, quoted in R.R. Davies, ‘Marc Bloch’,
History, LII, 1967, p. 273.

27 See, for example, F.M. Powicke, Modern Historians and the Study of
History, Odhams, 1955, p. 202.

28 Quoted in H. Butterfield, Man on His Past, Cambridge University
Press, 1955, p. 91.

29 Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870-1914, Penguin,
1994.

30 E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848,
Cardinal, 1973, p. 11.

31 See, for example, C.C. Eldridge (ed.), British Imperialism in the
Nineteenth Century, Macmillan, 1984.

32 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, Fontana, 1969, p. 22.

33 Braudel, The Mediterranean, vol. I, p. 16.

34 Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the social sciences: la longue duree’,
1958, reprinted in his On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, p. 26.

35 Susan R. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood
and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War,
University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Susan Pedersen, Family,
Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State, Cambridge
University Press, 1993.

36 J.H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in
America, 1492-1830, Yale University Press, 2006, p. xvii.

37 Ibid., p. xviii.

38 J.H. Elliott, Times Literary Supplement, 23 June 1989, p. 699.

39 R.W. Chapman (ed.), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Oxford University
Press, 1953, p. 304.

1 74

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

40 Richard Cobb, A Second Identity, Oxford University Press, 1969,
pp. 19-20.

41 H. Stuart Hughes, History as Art and as Science, Chicago University
Press, 1964, pp. 65-6.

42 M.M. Reese (ed.), Gibbon’s Autobiography, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1970, p. 99.

43 Theodore Zeldin, ‘After Braudel’, The Listener, 5 November 1981,
p. 542.

44 Galbraith, Introduction, p. 4.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The limits of historical
knowledge

Historians make many claims for their subject, but can any
historical account amount to anything more than its author’s
personal take on the past? This chapter looks at the debate
surrounding the essential nature of historical work and therefore,
to some extent, its value. The positivist position sees history as
a form of science, in which historians amass facts from hard
evidence and draw valid conclusions; the idealists on the other
hand stress that the incomplete and imperfect nature of the
historical record obliges the historian to employ a considerable
degree of human intuition and imagination. Challenging both
positions are the Postmodernists, who point to the highly
subjective values and assumptions latent not just in the historical
record but in the very language that historians use to express
their ideas. Does this mean that objective historical accounts
are an impossibility, and if so, what is the student to make of a
philosophy that questions history’s very existence as a subject?

T he earlier chapters of this book were essentially descriptive.

They were intended to show how historians go about their
work - their guiding assumptions, their handling of the evidence
and their presentation of conclusions. The point has now been
reached where some fundamental questions about the nature of
historical enquiry can be posed: how securely based is our knowl-
edge of the past? Can the facts of history be taken as given? What
authority should be attached to attempts at historical explana-
tion? Can historians be objective? Answers to these questions

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

History publishing is
a huge business, with
thousands of new titles
appearing every year.

Does this mean that we
are closer to the truth
about the past, or does it
just mean that there are
as many histories as there
are people prepared to
write them?

[© James Leynse/CORBIS)

have taken widely divergent forms and have occasioned intense
debate, much of it fuelled by criticisms from outside the ranks of
historians. The profession is deeply divided about the status of its
findings. At one extreme there are those such as G.R. Elton who
maintained that humility in the face of the evidence and training
in the technicalities of research have steadily enlarged the stock
of certain historical knowledge; notwithstanding the arguments
which the professionals take such delight in, history is a cumula-
tive discipline . 1 At the other extreme, Theodore Zeldin holds that
all he (or any historian) can offer his readers is his personal vision
of the past, and the materials out of which they in turn can fashion
a personal vision that corresponds to their own aspirations and
sympathies: ‘everyone has the right to find his own perspective ’. 2
Although the weight of opinion among academic historians
inclines towards Elton’s position, every viewpoint between the
two extremes finds adherents within the profession. Elistorians are
in a state of confusion about what exactly they are up to - a con-
fusion not usually apparent in the confident manner with which
they often pronounce on major problems of interpretation.

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

I

Is history a science?

To ask such questions about history or any other branch of
learning is to enter the terrain of philosophy, since what is at
issue is the nature of knowledge itself; and the status of historical
knowledge has been hotly contested among philosophers since
the Renaissance. Most working historians - even those disposed
to reflect on the nature of their craft - take little account of these
debates, believing with some justification that they often obscure
rather than clarify the issues. 3 But the intense disagreement that
divides historians reflects a tradition of keen debate among
philosophers. During the nineteenth century two sharply opposed
positions crystallized around the question of whether history was
a science; as recently as the 1960s, when E.H. Carr created such
a stir, this was still the key epistemological issue in history. In
our own day the ground of debate has shifted to the nature of
language and the extent of its bearing on the real world, past and
present. Both these debates - the scientific and the linguistic - will
now be examined in turn.

The central question in the debate about history and science
has always been whether humankind should be studied in the
same way as other natural phenomena. Those who answer this
question in the affirmative are committed to the methodological
unity of all forms of disciplined enquiry into the human and
natural order. They argue that history employs the same pro-
cedures as the natural sciences and that its findings should be
judged by scientific standards. They may differ as to how far
history has in fact fulfilled these requirements, but they are agreed
that historical knowledge is valid only in so far as it conforms to
scientific method. During the twentieth century conceptions of
the nature of science have been radically modified, but the nine-
teenth-century view was straightforward enough. The basis of all
scientific knowledge was the meticulous observation of reality by
the disinterested, ‘passive’ observer, and the outcome of repeated
observations of the same phenomenon was a generalization or
‘law’ that fitted all the known facts and explained the regularity
observed. The assumption of this, the ‘inductive’ or ‘empirical’
method, was that generalizations flowed logically from the data,
and that scientists approached their task without preconceptions
and without moral involvement.

epistemological

Relating to the theory of
knowledge, how we know
things.

disinterested

Neutral, objective. Not
to be confused with
'uninterested'.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Positivism: induction from facts

As a result of its immense strides in both pure and applied work,
science enjoyed unrivalled prestige during the nineteenth century.
If its methods unlocked the secrets of the natural world, might
they not prove the key to understanding society and culture?
Positivism is the name given to the philosophy of knowledge
that expresses this approach in its classic, nineteenth-century
form. Its implications for the practice of history are clear. The
historian’s first duty is to accumulate factual knowledge about
the past - facts that are verified by applying critical method
to the primary sources; those facts will in turn determine how
the past should be explained or interpreted. In this process the
beliefs and values of historians are irrelevant; their sole concern
is with the facts and the generalizations to which they logically
lead. Auguste Comte, the most influential positivist philosopher
of the nineteenth century, believed that historians would in due
course uncover the ‘laws’ of historical development. Full-blown
professions of positivist faith are still made occasionally , 4 but
nowadays a watered-down version is preferred. Latter-day posi-
tivists maintain that the study of history cannot generate its own
laws; rather, the essence of historical explanation lies in the
correct application of generalizations derived from other disci-
plines supposedly based on scientific method, such as economics,
sociology and psychology.

Idealism: intuition and empathy

The second position, which corresponds to the school of phi-
losophy known as idealism, rejects the fundamental assumption
of positivism. According to this view, human events must be
carefully distinguished from natural events because the identity
between the enquirer and his or her subject matter opens the way
to a fuller understanding than anything that the natural scientist
can aspire to. Whereas natural events can only be understood
from the outside, human events have an essential ‘inside’ dimen-
sion composed of the intentions, feelings and mentality of the
actors. Once the enquirer strays into this realm the inductive
method is of limited use. The reality of past events must instead
be apprehended by an imaginative identification with the people
of the past, which depends on intuition and empathy - qualities

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

1 79

that have no place in the classical view of scientific method.
According to idealists, therefore, historical knowledge is inher-
ently subjective, and the truths that it uncovers are more akin
to truth in the artist’s sense than the scientist’s. Furthermore,
historians are concerned with the individual, unique event. The
generalizations of the social sciences are not applicable to the
study of the past, nor does history yield any generalizations or
laws of its own.

This outlook came naturally to the nineteenth-century propo-
nents of historicism (see Chapter 1) with their demand that every
age be understood in its own terms, and their practical emphasis
on political narrative made up of the actions and intentions of
‘great men’. Ranke’s fame as the champion of rigorous source
criticism has sometimes been allowed to obscure the emphasis
that he laid on contemplation and imagination: ‘after the labour
of criticism’, he insisted, ‘intuition is required’. 5 In the English-
speaking world the most original and sophisticated exponent of
the idealist position has been the philosopher and historian R.G.
Collingwood. In his posthumously published The Idea of History
(1946), he maintained that all history is essentially the history
of thought, and that the historian’s task is to re-enact in his or
her own mind the thoughts and intentions of individuals in the
past. Collingwood’s influence is evident in the case of present-day
opponents of ‘scientific’ theory such as Zeldin, who deplores the
tendency for history to become ‘a coffee-house in which to discuss
the findings of other disciplines in time perspective’ and pleads
for a history concerned with individuals and their emotions. 6
Conversely, history’s scientific pretensions tend to be taken much
more seriously by historians of collective behaviour - voting or
consumption for example - because in these spheres regularities
are evident that can sometimes form the basis of firm and signifi-
cant generalizations.

But the implications of the unresolved clash between posi-
tivism and idealism go much further than the distinction between
traditional political history and the more recent fields of economic
and social history. They help to explain why there is so much
disagreement among historians about the nature of virtually every
aspect of their work from primary source evaluation through to
the finished work of interpretation.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

II

An incomplete and tainted record

Much of the professional self-esteem of the new breed of academic
historians in the nineteenth century was based on the rigorous
techniques that they had perfected for the location and criticism
of primary sources. The canons they established have governed
the practice of historians ever since, so that the whole edifice of
modern historical knowledge is founded on the painstaking evalu-
ation of original documents. But the injunction ‘Be true to your
sources’ is less straightforward than it looks, and sceptics have
seized on a number of problem areas. First, the primary sources
available to the historian are an incomplete record, not only
because so much has perished by accident or design but in a more
fundamental sense because a great deal that happened left no
material trace whatever. This is particularly true of mental proc-
esses, both conscious and unconscious. No historical character,
however prominent and articulate, has ever set down more than
a tiny proportion of his or her thoughts and assumptions; and
often some of the most influential beliefs are those that are taken
for granted and therefore are not discussed in the documents.
Second, the sources are tainted by the less than pure intentions of
their authors and - more insidiously - by their confinement within
the assumptions of men and women in that time and place. ‘The
so-called “sources” of history record only such facts as appeared
sufficiently interesting to record ’; 7 or, more polemically, the his-
torical record is forever rigged in favour of the ruling class, which
at all times has created the vast majority of the surviving sources.
In some Marxist circles this contention has led to an absolute
scepticism about the possibility of knowledge of the past, and
history has been put on the intellectual scrap-heap.

There is an element of truth in both these criticisms, but those
who push them to extremes betray an ignorance of how histo-
rians actually work. What a researcher can learn from a set of
documents is not confined to its explicit meaning; that meaning
is first of all scrutinized for bias and then used as the basis for
inference. When properly applied, the critical method enables the
historian to make allowances for both deliberate distortion and
the unthinking reflexes of the writer - to extract meaning ‘against
the grain of the documentation’, in Raphael Samuel’s useful
phrase . 8 Much of the criticism directed against historical method

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

1 81

rests on the common misconception that primary sources are the
testimonies of witnesses - who like all witnesses are fallible but in
this instance are not available for cross-examination. Yet, as was
shown in Chapter 5, a great deal of the historian’s documenta-
tion is made up of record sources which themselves constitute the
event or process under investigation: historians interested, say,
in the character of Gladstone or the administrative machinery
of the medieval Chancery are not dependent on contemporary
reports and impressions (interesting though these may be); they
can base their accounts on the private correspondence and diaries
of Gladstone himself, or on the records generated in the course
of the Chancery’s day-to-day business. Moreover, much of the
importance attached to primary sources derives not from the
intentions of the writer but from information that was incidental
to his or her purpose and yet may provide a flash of insight into an
otherwise inaccessible aspect of the past. The historian, in short,
is not confined by the categories of thought in which the docu-
ments were composed. 9

A surfeit of records

But there is a third and more formidable difficulty in the notion
that historians simply follow where the documents lead, and this
turns on the profusion of the available sources. These sources
may, it is true, represent a very incomplete record; yet for all but
very remote periods and places they survive in completely unman-
ageable quantities. This is a problem that has been confronted
only during the present century. Nineteenth-century historians,
especially those of a positivist turn of mind such as Lord Acton,
believed that finality in historical writing would be attained when
primary research had brought to light a complete assemblage of
the facts; many of these facts might seem obscure and trivial, but
they would all tell in the end. These writers were blinded to the
limitations of their method by the very narrow way in which they
conceived both the content of history and a primary source: when
Acton at the end of the nineteenth century wrote, ‘nearly all the
evidence that will ever appear is accessible now’, 10 he was refer-
ring only to the great collections of state records. Since Acton’s
day the subject matter of history has been vastly enlarged, and the
significance of whole bodies of source material whose existence
nineteenth-century historians were scarcely aware of has been

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

established. Faced with the virtually limitless content that history
could in theory embrace, modern historians have been compelled
to subject the notion of historical ‘fact’ to severe scrutiny.

What are facts?

Objection is sometimes made to the idea of ‘facts’ in history on the
grounds that they rest on inadequate standards of proof: most of
what pass for the ‘facts’ of history actually depend on inference.
Historians read between the lines, or they work out what really
happened from several contradictory indications, or they may do
no more than establish that the writer was probably telling the
truth. But in none of these cases can the historian observe the facts
in the way that a physicist can. Historians generally have little
time for this kind of critique. Formal proof may be beyond their
reach; what matters is the validity of the inferences. In practice
historians spend a good deal of time disputing and refining the
inferences that can be legitimately drawn from the sources, and
the facts of history can be said to rest on inferences whose validity
is widely accepted by expert opinion. Who, they ask with some
justice, could reasonably ask for more?

Historians are much more troubled by the implications of the
apparently limitless number of facts about the past that can be
verified in this way. If the entire past of humankind falls within
the historian’s scope, then every fact about that past may be said
to have some claim on our attention. But historians do not proceed
on this assumption - not even the specialist in some limited aspect
of a well-defined period. There is in practice no limit to the number
of facts that have a bearing on such a problem, and the historian
who resolved to be guided solely by the facts would never reach
any conclusion. The common-sense idea (and the central tenet of
positivism) that historians efface themselves in front of the facts
‘out there’ is therefore an illusion. The facts are not given, they
are selected. Despite appearances, they are never left to speak
for themselves. However detailed a historical narrative may be,
and however committed its author to the re-creation of the past,
it never springs from the sources ready-made; many events are
omitted as trivial, and those that do find a place in the narrative
tend to be seen through the eyes of one particular participant or
a small group. Analytical history, in which the writer’s intention
is to abstract the factors with greatest explanatory power, is more

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

1 83

obviously selective. Historical writing of all kinds is determined
as much by what it leaves out as by what it puts in. That is why
it makes sense to distinguish with E.H. Carr between the facts of
the past and the facts of history. The former are limitless and in
their entirety unknowable; the latter represent a selection made by
successive historians for the purpose of historical reconstruction
and explanation: ‘The facts of history cannot be purely objective,
since they become facts of history only in virtue of the significance
attached to them by the historian ’. 11

The selection and rejection of facts

If historical facts are selected, it is important to identify the cri-
teria employed in selecting them. Are there commonly shared
principles, or is it a matter of personal whim? One answer, much
favoured since Ranke’s day, is that historians are concerned to
reveal the essence of the events under consideration. Namier
expressed this idea metaphorically:

The function of the historian is akin to that of the painter and not of
the photographic camera; to discover and set forth, to single out and
stress that which is of the nature of the thing, and not to reproduce
indiscriminately all that meets the eye . 12

But this amounts to little more than a restatement of the original
question, for how is the ‘nature of the thing’ to be determined? It
makes for less confusion if it is admitted outright that the stand-
ards of significance applied by the historian are defined by the
nature of the historical problem that he or she is seeking to solve.

As M.M. Postan put it:

The facts of history, even those which in historical parlance figure
as ‘hard and fast’, are no more than relevances: facets of past facets

phenomena which happen to relate to the preoccupations of historical Features, characteristics,
inquirers at the time of their inquiries.

As new historical facts are accepted into the canon, so old ones
pass out of currency except, as Postan mischievously remarks, in
textbooks that are full of ‘ex-facts ’. 13

There is an element of rhetorical exaggeration about this view.

Historical knowledge abounds in facts such as the Great Fire of
London or the execution of Charles I whose status is for all prac-
tical purposes unassailable, and critics such as Elton have seized
on this point to discredit the distinction between the facts of the

1 84

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

past and the facts of history, which they feel introduces a dan-
gerous element of subjectivity. 14 But, as anyone who has sampled
the work of professional historians knows, historical writing is
never composed entirely, or even principally, of these unassailable
facts. The decision whether to include this set of facts rather than
that is closely affected by the purpose that informs the historian’s
work.

Clearly, then, much depends on the kind of questions that the
historian has in mind at the outset of research. As was discussed
in Chapter 5, there is something to be said for selecting a rich and
previously untapped vein of source material and being guided by
whatever questions it throws up (see pp. 120-21). The difficulty
with this method is that nobody actually approaches the sources
with a completely open mind - the grounding in the standard
secondary literature which precedes any research will see to that.
Even if no specific questions have been formulated, the researcher
will study the sources with certain assumptions that are only too
likely to be an unthinking reflection of current orthodoxy, and the
result will be merely a clarification of detail or a modification of
emphasis within the prevailing framework of interpretation.

Historical hypotheses

Significant advances in historical understanding are more likely
to be achieved when a historian puts forward a clearly formu-
lated hypothesis that can be tested against the evidence. The
answers may not correspond to the hypothesis, which must then
be discarded or modified, but merely to ask new questions has
the important effect of alerting historians to unfamiliar aspects
of familiar problems and to unsuspected data in well-worked
sources. Consider, for example, the origins of the English Civil
War. Nineteenth-century historians approached this as a problem
of competing political and religious ideologies, and they selected
accordingly from the great mass of surviving information about
early seventeenth-century England. From the 1930s onwards an
increasing number of scholars sought to test a Marxist approach
to the conflict, and as a result new material which related to the
economic fortunes of the gentry, the aristocracy and the urban
bourgeoisie became critically important. More recently several
historians have employed a ‘Namierite’ approach in which the
constitutional and military conflicts are seen as the expression of

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rivalry between political factions: hence the networks of patronage
and the intrigues at court are now coming more into play . 15 The
point is not that the Marxist or Namierite position amounts to a
rounded explanation of the war but rather that each hypothesis
has brought into focus certain previously neglected factors which
will have a bearing on any future interpretation. Marc Bloch,
whose own work proceeded on the basis of hypotheses, put the
issue clearly:

Every historical research supposes that the inquiry has a direction at
the very first step. In the beginning, there must be the guiding spirit.
Mere passive observation, even supposing such a thing were possible,
has never contributed anything productive to any science . 16

A new understanding of the nature of science

Significantly, scientists today would themselves mostly agree. The
positivist theory still dominates the lay person’s view of science,
but it no longer carries much conviction among the scientific com-
munity. Inductive thought and passive observation have ceased
to be regarded as the hallmarks of scientific method. Rather, all
observation whether of the natural or the human world is selec-
tive and therefore presupposes a hypothesis or theory, however
incoherent it may be. In Karl Popper’s influential view, scien-
tific knowledge consists not of laws but of the best available
hypotheses; it is provisional rather than certain knowledge. Our
understanding advances through the formulation of new hypoth-
eses that go beyond the evidence currently available and must
be tested against further observation, which will either refute or
corroborate the hypothesis. And because hypotheses go beyond
the evidence, they necessarily involve a flash of insight or an
imaginative leap, often the bolder the better. Scientific method,
then, is a dialogue between hypothesis and attempted refutation,
or between creative and critical thought . 17 To historians this is
a much more congenial definition of science than the one it has
replaced.

Karl Popper (1902-94]

British scientist and
philosopher. Popper
rejected induction as
a basis for science
and argued that the
proper role of scientific
observation was to refute
existing theories rather
than to try to confirm
them.

The importance of imagination

But although history and the natural sciences may converge in
some of their fundamental methodological assumptions, impor-
tant differences remain. First, far greater play is allowed to the

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imagination in history. It is by no means confined to the for-
mulation of hypotheses but permeates the historian’s thinking.
Historians are not, after all, only concerned to explain the past;
they also seek to reconstruct or re-create it - to show how life
was experienced as well as how it may be understood - and
this requires an imaginative engagement with the mentality and
atmosphere of the past. As Joseph C. Miller puts it:

History turns data into evidence not by pursuing the technical

attributes of data but by substituting a distinctively intuitive,

humanistic, holistic strategy for the experimental method of science . 18

In maintaining that all history is the history of thought,
Collingwood unduly confined the scope of the subject. But it is
certainly true that the evaluation of documentary sources depends
on a reconstruction of the thought behind them; before anything
else can be achieved, the historian must first try to enter the
mental world of those who created the sources.

Furthermore, although idealists from Ranke to Collingwood
have placed an exaggerated emphasis on ‘unique’ events, indi-
viduals are certainly a legitimate and necessary object of historical
study, and the variety and unpredictability of individual behav-
iour (as opposed to the regularities of mass behaviour) demand
qualities of empathy and intuition in the enquirer as well as
logical and critical skills. And whereas scientists can often create
their own data by experiment, historians are time and again con-
fronted by gaps in the evidence which they can make good only by
developing a sensitivity as to what might have happened, derived
from an imagined picture that has taken shape in the course of
becoming immersed in the surviving documentation. In all these
ways imagination is vital to the historian. It not only generates
fruitful hypotheses; it is also deployed in the reconstruction of
past events and situations by which those hypotheses are tested.

The impossibility of consensus

The second and even more critical distinction to be made between
history and the natural sciences is that the standing of explana-
tions put forward by historians is very much inferior to that of
scientific explanation. It may be that scientific explanations are no
more than provisional hypotheses, but they are for the most part
hypotheses on which all people qualified to judge are in agree-
ment; they may be superseded one day, but for the time being they

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represent the nearest possible approximation to the truth and are
commonly recognized as such. In matters of historical explana-
tion, on the other hand, a scholarly consensus scarcely exists. The
known facts may not be in doubt, but how to interpret or explain
them is a matter of endless debate, as my example of the English
Civil War illustrated. The ‘faction hypothesis’ has not superseded
the ‘class-conflict hypothesis’ or the ‘ideology hypothesis’; all
are very much alive and receive varying emphasis from different
historians.

The reason for this diversity of opinion lies in the complex
texture of historical change. We saw in Chapter 6 how both
individual and collective behaviour are influenced by an immense
range of contrasting factors. What needs stressing here is that
each historical situation is unique in the sense that the exact con-
figuration of causal factors is unrepeatable. It might be argued,
for instance, that the reasons why the European powers withdrew
from most of their African colonies during the 1950s and 1960s
were common to some thirty-odd different territories. But this
would be valid only as a very broad-brush statement. The respec-
tive strength of the colonial power and the nationalist movement
varied from one country to another according to its value to the
metropolis, its experience of social change, the size of the resident
European community, and so on. 19 In practice, therefore, each
situation has to be investigated afresh, with the strong possibility
of different findings, and as a result the basis for a comprehensive
theory of historical causation simply does not exist.

A multiplicity of hypotheses

Perhaps this would not matter if certainty was attainable in
explaining particular events. But this more modest objective eludes
historians as well. The problem here is that the evidence is never
sufficiently full and unambiguous to place a causal interpretation
beyond doubt. This is true of even the best-documented events. In
a case like the origins of the First World War, the sources provide
ample evidence of the motives of the protagonists, the sequence of
diplomatic moves, the state of public opinion, the upward spiral
of the arms race, the relative economic strength of all the nations
involved, and so on. But what the evidence alone cannot do is tell
us the relative importance of all these varied factors, or present a
comprehensive picture of how they interacted with each other. 20

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Burckhardt (1818-97)

Jakob Burckhardt, Swiss
historian. He is credited
with having coined
the term 'Renaissance'
(French: 'rebirth') to
describe the cultural
changes and revival of
classical form in fifteenth-
century Italy.

In many instances the sources do not directly address the central
issues of historical explanation at all. Some of the influences on
human conduct, such as the natural environment or the neurotic
and irrational, are apprehended subconsciously; others may be
experienced directly but not disclosed in the sources. Questions
of historical explanation cannot, therefore, be resolved solely
by reference to the evidence. Historians are also guided by their
intuitive sense of what was possible in a given historical context,
by their reading of human nature, and by the claims of intellec-
tual coherence. In each of these areas they are unlikely to concur.
As a result, several different hypotheses can hold the field at any
one time. Burckhardt frankly acknowledged the problem in the
Preface to his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860):

In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and
directions are many; and the same studies which have served for this
work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different
treatment and application, but lead also to essentially different
conclusions . 21

The area of knowledge beyond dispute is both smaller and much
less significant in history than it is in the natural sciences. This is a
crucial limitation which is not properly confronted by present-day
champions of ‘objectivity’ in history. 22

Ill

The historian as selector

This comparison between history and natural sciences is perhaps
somewhat contrived, given that the assumptions most people
make about the standing of scientific knowledge are an outdated
residue of nineteenth-century positivism; scientific knowledge is
in reality less certain and less objective than is commonly sup-
posed. But what the comparison does bring out is the extent
to which our knowledge of the past depends on choices freely
exercised by the historian. The common-sense notion that the
business of historians is simply to uncover the past and display
what they have found will not stand up. The essence of historical
enquiry is selection - of ‘relevant’ sources, of ‘historical’ facts and
of ‘significant’ interpretations. At every stage both the direction
and the destination of the enquiry are determined as much by the
enquirer as by the data. Clearly, the rigid segregation of fact and

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value demanded by the positivists is unworkable in history. In
this sense, historical knowledge is not, and cannot be, ‘objective’
(that is, empirically derived in its entirety from the object of the
enquiry). This does not mean, as sceptics might suppose, that it is
therefore arbitrary or illusory. But it does follow that the assump-
tions and attitudes of historians themselves have to be carefully
assessed before we can come to any conclusion about the real
status of historical knowledge.

The historian in context

Up to a point those standards can be seen as the property of the
individual historian. The experience of research is a personal and
often very private one, and no two historians will share the same
imaginative response to their material. As Richard Cobb put it,
‘the writing of history is one of the fullest and most rewarding
expressions of an individual personality’. 23 But however rarefied
the atmosphere that historians breathe, they are, like everyone
else, affected by the assumptions and values of their own society.
It is more illuminating to see historical interpretation as moulded
by social rather than individual experience. And because social
values change, it follows that historical interpretation is subject to
constant revision. What one age finds worthy of note in the past
may well be different from what previous ages found worthy. This
principle can be illustrated many times over within the relatively
short span of time since the emergence of the academic profes-
sion of history. For Ranke and his contemporaries the sovereign
nation-states which dominated the Europe of their day seemed
the climax of the historical process; the state was the principal
agent of historical change, and human destiny was largely deter-
mined by the shifting balance of power between states. This world
view was seriously eroded by the First World War: after 1919,
against the background of optimism engendered by the League
of Nations, history teaching in Britain tended to stress rather the
growth of internationalism over the centuries.

More recently, the way in which historians study the world
beyond Europe and the United States has been transformed in the
light of the changes they have lived through. Fifty years ago the
history of Africa was still treated as an aspect of the expansion of
Europe, in which the indigenous peoples scarcely featured except
as the object of white policies and attitudes. Today the perspective

empiricism

Reasoning from
experiment and
experience, rather than
from theoretical principles.
Although strict scientific
experimentation is a form
of empiricism, so too is
deduction based on ill-
defined 'common sense',
which can lend empiricism
an ambiguous intellectual
status.

League of Nations

The international
organization set up at
the end of the First
World War to settle
international disputes
without recourse to war. It
inspired enormous levels
of optimism, especially in
Britain, in its early years.

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Peter Laslett
( 1915 - 2001 )

British historian. He
pioneered the study
of the history of the
English family. His
ground-breaking work
of social history The
World We Have Lost
(1965) overturned many
common assumptions
about everyday life in early
modern England.

Sir Michael Howard
( 1 922 -)

British military historian,
Regius Professor of
Modern History at Oxford
1 980-9.

is very different. African history exists in its own right, embracing
both the pre-colonial past and the African experience of - and
response to - colonial rule, and stressing the continuities of
African historical development, which had previously been com-
pletely obscured by the stress on the European occupation. And
those continuities have already been reassessed: whereas in the
1960s historians of Africa were mainly concerned with placing
African nationalism in a historical perspective of pre-colonial
state formation and resistance to colonial rule, they are now,
after forty years’ disillusionment with the fruits of independence,
preoccupied with the historical antecedents of Africa’s deepening
poverty. Twice in the course of a single lifetime the standards of
significance applied by historians to the African past have been
substantially revised.

However, to say that history is rewritten by each generation
(or decade) is only part of the truth - and positively misleading
if it suggests the replacement of one consensus by another. In
the case of history written during the High Middle Ages or the
Renaissance it might be appropriate to speak of a scholarly con-
sensus, since historians and their audience were drawn from a
very restricted sector of society, and at this distance in time the
differences between historians seem much less significant than
the values they held in common. But the attainment of universal
literacy and the extension of education in Western society in the
twentieth century mean that historical writing now reflects a much
wider range of values and assumptions. The towering political
personalities of the past such as Oliver Cromwell or Napoleon
Bonaparte are interpreted in widely divergent ways by profes-
sional historians as well as lay people, partly according to their
own political values. 24 Liberal or conservative historians such as
Peter Laslett tend to conceive of social relations in pre-industrial
England as reciprocal, while radically inclined historians such
as E.P. Thompson see them as exploitative. 25 Michael Howard
has made public confession of a bias that is widely shared - a
bias in favour of a liberal political order in which alone the his-
torian has been permitted to work without censorship. 26 Many
other historians, however, would set a higher value on mate-
rial progress or equality in social relations than on freedom of
thought and expression. Historical interpretation is a matter of
value judgements, moulded to a greater or lesser degree by moral
and political attitudes. At the beginning of the twentieth century

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Acton’s successor at Cambridge, J.B. Bury, looked forward to
the dawn of scientific history with these words: ‘Though there
be many schools of political philosophy, there will no longer be
divers schools of history’. 27 It would be nearer the truth to say that
for as long as there are many schools of political philosophy there
will be divers schools of history. Paradoxically there is an element
of present-mindedness about all historical enquiry.

The search for origins

The problem, of course, is to determine at what point present-
mindedness conflicts with the historian’s aspiration to be true to
the past. The conflict is clearest in the case of those writers who
ransack the past for material to fuel a particular ideology, or who
falsify it in support of a political programme, as Nazi historians
did under the Third Reich and supporters of Holocaust denial do
today. Such works are propaganda, not history, and it is usually
clear to the professional - and sometimes the lay person - that
evidence has been suppressed or manufactured. Among historians
themselves present-mindedness commonly takes two forms. The
first is an interest in the historical origins of the modern world,
or some particularly salient feature of it - say the nuclear family
household or parliamentary democracy. In itself this is a positive
response to the claims of social relevance, and it has the merit of
providing a clear principle of selection leading to an intelligible
picture of the past. But it also carries risks of superficiality and
distortion. The problem with seeking the historical antecedents
of some characteristically ‘modern’ feature is that the outcome
can so easily seem to be predetermined, instead of being the
result of complex historical processes. Abstracting one strand of
development to be traced back to its origins too often means an
indifference to historical context; the further back the enquiry
proceeds, the more likely will a stress on linear descent obscure
the contemporary significance of the institution or convention
in question. Thus the Whig historians of the nineteenth century
completely misunderstood the structure of medieval English
government because of their obsessive interest in the origins of
Parliament. A comparable criticism has been levelled at recent
work on the medieval and early modern history of family relations
and sexuality. 28 As Butterfield put it in The Whig Interpretation
of History (1931) - probably the most influential polemic ever

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written against present-minded history - ‘the study of the past
with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins
and sophistries in history, starting with the simplest of them, the
anachronism’. 29 ‘Whig’ history exhibits a tendency to underesti-
mate the differences between past and present - to project modern
ways of thought backwards in time and to discount those aspects
of past experience that are alien to modern ideas. In this way it
reduces history’s social value, which derives largely from its being
a storehouse of past experiences contrasted to our own.

A voice for the oppressed

Today a second variant of present-minded history (or ‘presentism’)
is much more prevalent. This is the history written out of political
commitment to a social group that has previously been marginal-
ized by the prevalent historiography. As explained in Chapter 1,
effective political action in the present requires an articulate social
memory, and to supply this has been one of the main objectives of
black historians and women’s historians in Britain and the United
States. It is said that the purpose of these radical histories is not
just to uncover what was previously ‘hidden from history’ 30 but
to demonstrate historical experience of a predetermined kind - in
this case oppression and resistance - to the exclusion of material
that fits less neatly with the political programme of the writer.
Thus the complicity of West African societies in the transat-
lantic slave trade may be omitted, or the sexual conservatism of
much nineteenth-century feminism. When ethnic particularism
or gender loyalty provides the decisive impetus for research, the
differences between ‘then’ and ‘now’ may be downplayed in the
cause of forging an identity across the ages, while no serious effort
may be made to understand the experience of other groups with
a part in the story. The way is then open for a reactive historiog-
raphy marked by a more explicit and hard-nosed defence of the
established order than that which existed before.

‘Everyman his own historian’

If the outcome of historical enquiry is so heavily conditioned by
the preferences of the enquirer and can so easily be altered by the
intervention of another enquirer, how can it merit any credibility
as a serious contribution to knowledge? If fact and value are

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inextricably tied together, how can a distinction be drawn between
sound and unsound history? Between the two World Wars it was
the fashion in some quarters to concede most, if not all, of the
sceptics’ case. Historical interpretation, these historians averred,
should be considered true only in relation to the needs of the
age in which it was written. With the phrase ‘Everyman his own
historian ’, 31 the American scholar Carl M. Becker renounced the
aspirations to definitive history that had characterized the profes-
sion since Ranke. More recently the case has been succinctly put
by Gordon Connell-Smith and Howell Lloyd:

History is not ‘the past’, nor yet the surviving past. It is a
reconstruction of certain parts of the past (from surviving evidence)
which in some way have had relevance for the present circumstances
of the historian who reconstructed them . 32

The unattainability of the past

The implications of this position are disturbing. Not surprisingly
historians are reluctant to allow their discipline’s claim to aca-
demic respectability to be so lightly abandoned. Over the past
forty years the orthodox response to relativism has been to make
what is essentially a restatement of historicism. Historians, the
argument goes, must renounce any standards or priorities external
to the age they are studying. Their aim is to understand the past in
its own terms, or in Elton’s words ‘to understand a given problem
from the inside ’. 33 Historians should be steeped in the values of the
age and should attempt to see events from the standpoint of those
who participated in them. Only then will they be true to their
material and their vocation. But this claim to speak with the voice
of the past will not bear inspection. On the face of it, historians
may appear to be strikingly successful in assimilating the values
of those they write about: diplomatic historians usually accept the
ethics of raison d’etat which have governed the conduct of interna-
tional relations in Europe since the Renaissance, and the historian
of a political movement may well be able to achieve an empathy
with the outlook and aspirations of its members. However, as
soon as historians cast their net more widely to embrace an entire
society, ‘the standards of the age’ becomes a question-begging
phrase. Whose standards should be adopted - those of the rich or
the poor, the colonized or the colonizers, Protestant or Catholic?
It is a fallacy to suppose that historians who renounce all claim to

G.R. Elton (1921-94)

Sir Geoffrey Elton first
made his name with a
detailed study, based
on his Ph.D. thesis, of
what he called The Tudor
Revolution In Government
He held that Thomas
Cromwell had instituted
such a strikingly modern
system of bureaucracy
at Henry Vlll's court that
it amounted in effect
to an administrative
revolution. However, Elton
was sometimes accused
of seeing everything in
Tudor England as if it
related to bureaucratic
administration.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

‘relevance’ thereby ensure the objectivity of their work. In practice
their writing is exposed to two dangers. On the one hand they
may find themselves confined by the priorities and assumptions
of those who created the sources; on the other, the end-product is
quite likely to be influenced - if only unconsciously - by their own
values, which are difficult to make allowances for because they
are undeclared. Elton’s work illustrates both these tendencies: his
Tudor England is seen through the spectacles of the authoritarian
paternalist bureaucracy whose records Elton knew so intimately
and whose outlook was evidently congenial to his own conserva-
tive convictions . 34 Re-creative history is a legitimate pursuit, but it
is a mistake to suppose that it can ever be completely realized, or
that it carries the promise of objective knowledge about the past.

History and hindsight

There is another serious difficulty encountered by the strictly his-
toricist approach. We can never recapture the authentic flavour of
a historical moment as it was experienced by people at the time
because we, unlike them, know what happened next; and the sig-
nificance which we accord to a particular incident is inescapably
conditioned by that knowledge. This is one of the most telling
objections that can be made against Collingwood’s idea that
historians re-enact the thought of individuals in the past. Like it
or not, the historian approaches the past with a superior vision
conferred by hindsight. Some historians do their best to renounce
this superior vision by confining their research to a few years or
even months of history, for which they can give a blow-by-blow
account with a minimum of selection or interpretation, but the
total divestment of hindsight is not intellectually possible. Besides,
should not hindsight be viewed as an asset to be exploited rather
than a disability to be overcome? It is precisely our position in
time relative to the subject of our enquiry that enables us to make
sense of the past - to identify conditioning factors of which the
historical participants were unaware, and to see consequences for
what they were rather than what they were intended to be. Strictly
interpreted, ‘history for its own sake’ would entail surrendering
most of what makes the subject worth pursuing at all, without
achieving the desired goal of complete detachment. The problems
of historical objectivity cannot be evaded by a retreat into the past
for the past’s sake.

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IV

The challenge of Postmodernism

So far this evaluation of historical enquiry has implied a hierarchy
of approaches in which positivist science stands as the ultimate
yardstick of intellectual rigour. Scientific method is here viewed
as the only means of gaining direct knowledge of reality, past or
present. The procedures of historicism offer a scarcely tenable
defence, and to the extent that they fall short of scientific method
must be deemed inferior. This debate has been running for as
long as history has been seriously studied, and it shows no sign of
being resolved. However, in the past three decades the hand of the
sceptics has been strengthened by a major intellectual shift within
the humanities that has rejected historicism as the basis for history
and all other text-based disciplines. This is Postmodernism. Its
hallmark is the prioritization of language over experience, leading
to outright scepticism as to the human capacity to observe and
interpret the external world, and especially the human world. The
implications of Postmodernism for the standing of historical work
are potentially serious and must be addressed with some care.

The tyranny of language

Modern theories of language stand in a tradition first laid out by
Ferdinand de Saussure at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Saussure declared that, far from being a neutral and passive
medium of expression, language is governed by its own internal
structure. The relationship between a word and the object or idea
it denotes - or between ‘signified and ‘signified’ in Saussure’s ter-
minology - is in the last resort arbitrary. No two languages have
an identical match between words and things; certain patterns
of thought or observation that are possible in one language are
beyond the resources of another. From this Saussure drew the con-
clusion that language is non-referential - that speech and writing
should be understood as a linguistic structure governed by its own
laws, not as a reflection of reality: language is not a window on
the world but a structure that determines our perception of the
world. This way of understanding language has the immediate
effect of downgrading the status of the writer: if the structure of
the language is so constraining, the meaning of a text will have
as much to do with the formal properties of the language as with

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

deconstructionists

Also known as
constructionists, the
literary forebears of
historical Postmodernists.
Inspired by the French
literary scholar Jacques
Derrida, they stressed the
importance of analysing
not just the wording of
a text but the hidden
assumptions and social
or moral values within
its vocabulary, even
questioning whether text
actually denotes what its
words theoretically mean.

the intentions of the writer, and perhaps more. Any notion that
writers can accurately convey ‘their’ meaning to their readers falls
to the ground. In a much-quoted phrase, Roland Barthes spoke
of ‘the death of the author ’. 35 One might equally speak of the
death of the textual critic in the traditional sense, since those who
interpret texts have as little autonomy as those who wrote them.
There can be no objective historical method standing outside the
text, only an interpretative point of address fashioned from the
linguistic resources available to the interpreter. The historian (or
literary critic) does not speak from a privileged vantage point.

However, it is simplistic to speak of the ‘language’ of any
society in the singular, if by this we mean to suggest a common
structure and uniform conventions. Any language is a complex
system of meanings - a multiple code in which words often signify
different meanings to different audiences; indeed the power of
language partly resides in the unintended layers of meaning it
conveys. The kind of textual analysis in which the immediate
or ‘surface’ meaning is set aside in favour of the less obvious is
called in Postmodern circles ‘deconstruction’ - a term coined by
Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction covers a bewildering mass of
daring and dissonant readings. If Saussure’s severance of signifier
from signified is treated as an absolute principle, there is after all
no limit to the range of permitted readings. The creative approach
to interpreting texts - playful, ironic and subversive by turns - is
a hallmark of Postmodern scholarship . 36

Intertextuality: text and context

For most exponents of the linguistic turn, however, some limit
is placed on the freedom with which we can ‘read’ texts by the
constraints of ‘intertextuality’. According to this perspective, the
texts of the past should not be viewed in isolation, because no
text has ever been composed in isolation. All writers employ a
language that has already served purposes similar to their own,
and their audience may interpret what they write with reference
to yet other conventions of language use. At any given time the
world of texts is composed of diverse forms of production, each
with its own cultural rationale, conceptual categories and pat-
terns of usage. Each text belongs, in short, to a ‘discourse’ or
body of language practice. Today the term ‘discourse’ is best
known in the distinctive twist given to it by French philosopher

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Michel Foucault. For him ‘discourse’ meant not just a pattern of
language use but a form of ‘power/knowledge’, pointing to the
way in which people are confined within the regulatory scope
of specific discourses. He showed how new, more restrictive
discourses of madness, punishment and sexuality became estab-
lished in Western Europe between 1750 and 1850, challenging
the conventional interpretation of this period as one of social and
intellectual progress. 37 Foucault was unusual among the founding
fathers of Postmodernism in conveying a strong sense of period.
But as used by most literary scholars, ‘discourse’ and ‘intertextu-
ality’ have a tendency to float free of any anchorage in the ‘real’
world, thus bearing out Derrida’s celebrated aphorism, ‘there is
nothing outside the text’. 38

Relativism: nothing is certain

Analysing discourse, like all the critical procedures associated
with modern linguistics, is founded on relativism. Its champions
dismiss the idea that language reflects reality as the represen-
tational fallacy. Language, they assert, is inherently unstable,
variable in its meanings over time, and contested in its own
time. If accepted at face value, that indeterminacy is fatal to
traditional notions of historical enquiry. It becomes meaning-
less to attempt a distinction between the events of the past and
the discourse in which they are represented; as Raphael Samuel
put it in a neat summary of Roland Barthes, history becomes ‘a
parade of signifiers masquerading as a collection of facts’. 39 As
we saw in Chapter 5, historians certainly do not regard their
primary sources as infallible, and they are accustomed to reading
them against the grain for implicit meanings. But underlying
their scholarly practice is the belief that the sources can yield up
some, at least, of the meaning they held for those who wrote and
read them originally. That is anathema to the deconstructionist,
for whom no amount of technical expertise can remove the
subjectivity and indeterminacy inherent in the reading of texts.
Deconstructionists offer us instead the pleasure of finding any
meanings we like, provided we do not claim authority for any of
them. No amount of scholarship can give us a privileged vantage
point. All that is available to us is a free interaction between
reader and text, in which there are no approved procedures and
no court of appeal. To claim any more is naivety or - in the more

Michel Foucault
( 1926 - 84 )

French philosopher
and social historian.
Foucault's studies of
restrictive or oppressive
institutions, such as
nineteenth-century
hospitals, prisons and
mental asylums, have led
to a new understanding
of the power relationship
between the individual
and the state.

anathema

Completely unacceptable.
The term comes from the
Roman Catholic Church,
where it is used to denote
ideas and beliefs that are
entirely incompatible with
Catholic doctrine.

1 98

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

intemperate Postmodernist statements - a deception practised on
the innocent reader.

The negation of history

Because historians claim vastly more than this, every aspect
of their practice is open to challenge by Postmodernism. Once
the validity of the historical method of interpreting texts is
undermined, all the procedures erected on that foundation are
called into question. The Rankean project of re-creating the
past collapses, because it depends on a privileged, ‘authentic’
reading of the primary sources. In place of historical explana-
tion, Postmodernist history can only offer intertextuality, which
deals in discursive relations between texts, not causal relations
between events; historical explanation is dismissed as no more
than a chimera to comfort those who cannot face a world without
meaning. 40 The conventional actors of history fare no better. If
the author is dead, so too is the unified historical subject, whether
conceived of as an individual or as a collectivity (such as class
or nation): according to the Postmodernist view, identity is con-
structed by language - fractured and unstable because it is the
focus of competing discourses. Perhaps most important of all,
deconstructing the individuals and groups who have been the
traditional actors in history means that history no longer has a
big story to tell. The nation, the working class, even the idea of
progress, all dissolve into discursive constructions. Continuity and
evolution are rejected in favour of discontinuity, as for example
in Foucault’s conception of four unconnected historical epochs
(or ‘epistemes’) since the sixteenth century. 41 Postmodernists are
generally scathing about the ‘grand narratives’ or ‘metanarratives’
of historians - such as the rise of capitalism or the growth of free
thought and toleration. The most they will concede is that the past
can be arranged into a multiplicity of stories, just as individual
texts are open to a plurality of readings.

A reappraisal as radical as this has major implications for how
we understand the activity of being a historian. Postmodernists
have brought two important perspectives to bear on this. First,
they emphasize that historical writing is a form of literary produc-
tion which, like any other genre, operates within certain rhetorical
conventions. In his very influential Metahistory (1973), Hayden
White analyses these conventions in aesthetic terms and classifies

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

1 99

historical writing according to twelve stylistic permutations and
four underlying ‘tropes’. The specifics of this elaborate analysis
are less important than White’s theoretical conclusion, that the
character of any work of history is determined not so much by
the author’s scholarship or ideology as by the aesthetic choices
that he or she makes (usually unconsciously) at the outset of the
enquiry and that inform the discursive strategies of the text. With
its privileging of the aesthetic over the ideological, this is a some-
what purist position. Postmodernism is currently more strongly
identified with a second perspective, in which the historian is seen
as the vector of a range of political positions rooted in the here
and now. Because the documentary residue of the past is open to
so many readings, and because historians employ language that
is ideologically tainted, history writing is never innocent. There
being no shape to history, historians cannot reconstruct and
delineate it from outside. The stories they tell, and the human
subjects they write about, are merely subjective preference, drawn
from an infinity of possible strategies. Historians are embedded in
the messy reality they seek to represent, and hence always bear
its ideological imprint. They may do no more than replicate the
dominant or ‘hegemonic’ ideology; alternatively, they may iden-
tify with one of a number of radical or subversive ideologies; but
all are equally rooted in the politics of today.

From this angle all versions of history are ‘presentist’, not
just the politically committed ones. In Keith Jenkins’s phrase,
history becomes ‘a discursive practice that enables present-minded
people(s) to go to the past, there to delve around and reorganise
it appropriately to their needs ’. 42 Since those needs are diverse,
and even mutually exclusive, there can be no community of
historians and no dialogue between those who hold to different
perspectives. Forty years ago, E.H. Carr represented the limits
of scepticism in the historical profession when he acknowledged
the dialogue between present and past that animates any work
of history. Postmodernists take a big step closer to relativism by
accepting - even celebrating - a plurality of concurrent interpreta-
tions, all equally valid (or invalid). ‘One must face the fact’, writes
Hayden White, ‘that, when it comes to the historical record, there
are no grounds to be found in the record itself for preferring one
way of construing its meaning rather than another ’. 43 Historians,
it is said, do not uncover the past; they invent it. And the time-
honoured distinction between fact and fiction is blurred.

trope

A metaphor or figure of
speech.

aesthetic

Artistic or relating to art or
beauty.

hegemonic

Dominant, exercising
power over a region or
domain.

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V

Postmodernism in context

How should historians respond to this onslaught? One task for
which they are well equipped is to place Postmodernism itself in
historical context. This means recognizing that it is located in a
particular cultural moment. As the name implies, Postmodernism
is a reactive phenomenon. ‘Modernism’ denotes the core beliefs
that underpinned the evolution of modern industrial societies from
the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, especially the
belief in progress and faith in the efficacy of disciplined, rational
enquiry. In throwing them over, Postmodernists signal their desire
for the new and for their emancipation from the previous genera-
tion. But the appeal of Postmodernism is best explained by its
resonance with some of the defining tendencies in contemporary
thought. For some time now the view has gained currency that
much that the West has traditionally stood for has come to a
dead end: its global supremacy is in decline, its technological flair
has become a liability (as in the arms race), and its much-vaunted
monopoly of reason is held to be irrelevant to an increasing
range of human problems, from the understanding of the psyche
to the care of the environment. The Holocaust, instead of being
treated as an aberration, is now taken to be a grimly ironical com-
mentary on the conventional equation of progress with Western
civilization. There is widespread disillusion with the previously
uncontested virtues of scientific method. Postmodernism is the
theoretical stance that best illustrates these tendencies. By calling
into question the possibility of objective enquiry, it undermines
the authority of science. By denying shape and purpose to history,
it distances us from all that we find hardest to face in our past - as
well as that in which we used to take pride. If, as Postmodernism
asserts, history really has no meaning, it follows that we must
become fully responsible for finding meaning in our own lives,
bleak and demanding though the task may be. History as tradi-
tionally conceived becomes not only impractical but irrelevant.

The precursors of Postmodernism

This is not the first time that the credentials of history as a
serious discipline have been called into question. The emphasis
placed by Postmodernists on the indeterminacy of language and

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

201

the pervading tone of cultural pessimism are very contemporary,
but their denial of historical truth has a very familiar ring about
it. In the era of religious wars in Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, historians were dismissed by philosophers
as credulous impostors, and their much-vaunted sources written
off as unreliable. The nineteenth-century historicists, despite
their more rigorous standards of scholarship, were soon being
attacked by relativists who argued that absolute historical truth
was a chimera. In fact there have been sceptics for as long as
history has been written. Doubts about the status of the ‘real’,
and our ability to apprehend it in the past or the present, have
been part of the Western philosophical tradition since the ancient
Greeks. Historians themselves have participated in these debates.
Postmodernism is less of a novelty than its proponents sometimes
claim.

History adapts

Nor is the relationship between history and Postmodernism
quite so antagonistic as my account so far implies. It may be,
as some Postmodernists argue, that the Rankean documentary
ideal is finished and that history as we know it is destined for the
scrap-heap . 44 But what this gloomy prognosis overlooks is that
historians are already in the process of assimilating aspects of the
Postmodernist perspective. As has so often been the case in the
past, root-and-branch critiques of the discipline have a tendency
to attack a straw man. Historians have always shown a capacity
to engage with critics of the truth claims of their discipline and
to take on board some of their arguments. They are not nearly
so committed to the unified historical subject as some critics
have supposed; it is now rare for scholarly writers to structure
a book around ‘the nation’ or ‘the working class’ without care-
fully analysing the changing and contested significance of these
labels . 45 Equally, many of the ‘grand narratives’ of Western
history - such as the Whig interpretation of English history or the
Industrial Revolution - have been subjected to much more devas-
tating attack by empirically minded historians than they have by
Postmodernists . 46

Historical writing has also been directly influenced by the
linguistic turn in the humanities. Recognizing the structural
constraints that language may impose on its users has proved

straw man

An old term for an idea or
body that is not as strong
as it looks.

202

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Reform Act

The pioneering measure
of parliamentary reform,
which was finally passed
into law in 1832.
Historians point out
that its provisions were
relatively modest but that
its symbolic importance
was immense.

a particularly helpful insight. Gareth Stedman Jones proved as
much in his reassessment of Chartism in Languages of Class
(1983). The failure of the Chartists to sustain a mass campaign
for popular democratic rights after the middle-class agenda had
been met in the Reform Act of 1832 has been explained in various
ways by historians. Stedman Jones concludes that the move-
ment essentially failed because its politics was constituted by a
discourse inherited from the past, which was inappropriate to a
rapidly changing political landscape. It is a powerful (though not
undisputed) case for ‘an analysis of Chartism which assigns some
autonomous weight to the language within which it was con-
ceived’. 47 Historians are also sympathetic to the notion that texts
embody more than one level of meaning, and that the implicit
or unconscious meaning may be what gives the text its power.
In late nineteenth-century Britain, for example, the popular lan-
guage of the New Imperialism was obviously about nationalism
and racism; but with its stress on ‘manliness’ and ‘character’ it
also carried a heavy charge of masculine insecurity, which arose
from changes in women’s position in the family and the work-
place. When politicians used that language, they both reflected
and intensified an uncertain sense of manhood, almost certainly
without meaning to. 48 Determining the discourse to which a par-
ticular text belongs, and its relation to other relevant discourses,
is a task that goes beyond the procedures of source criticism as
traditionally understood. As a result, historians now tend to be
more sensitive to the counter-currents of meaning in their sources,
pushing Marc Bloch’s well-known aphorism about ‘witnesses in
spite of themselves’ in a new and rewarding direction.

Language and cultural hegemony

Equally, the Postmodern critique of historical writing has met
with some positive responses among historians. In particular,
Hayden White’s dissection of the literary conventions embedded
in historical narrative has resulted in a renewed awareness of
historical writing as a literary form and a greater readiness to
experiment. 49 Even more promising, the Postmodern deconstruc-
tion of discourse as a form of cultural power has made it harder
to ignore the fact that history writing itself can be an expression
of cultural hegemony, and this in turn has opened up opportuni-
ties for radical contestation by groups previously excluded from

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

203

the record. Edward Said’s interest in how language is formed and
how a subject is constituted has gone hand in hand with his inves-
tigation of the Arab and the Palestinian in Western discourse; his
path-breaking Orientalism (1976) proved to be a turning point
in the emergence of a post-colonial or multicultural history (see
Chapter 10). Feminists, in their ambition to penetrate the limita-
tions of ‘man-made language’, have acknowledged a comparable
debt to the linguistic turn. 50 These instances go some way to
support the Postmodernists’ contention that their perspective
holds out the prospect of democratic empowerment. When to
that is added the pervasive influence of language-led theory on
the development of cultural history in recent years (as discussed in
Chapter 9), it is clear that the encounter between Postmodernism
and more traditional theories of history has been quite fruitful.

VI

The limitations of Postmodernism

However, there is a limit beyond which most historians will not
go in embracing Postmodernism. Many welcome a greater sophis-
tication in interpreting texts and a heightened awareness of the
cultural significance of historical writing. But few are prepared
to join in a rejection of the truth claims of history as usually
practised. Confronted by the full force of the deconstructionist
critique, historians tend to be confirmed in their preference for
experience and observation over first principles. In theory an
impeccable case can be made for the proposition that all human
language is self-referential rather than representational. But daily
life tells us that language works extremely well in many situations
where meaning is clearly communicated and correctly inferred.
On any other assumption human interaction would break down
completely. If language demonstrably serves these practical func-
tions in the present, there is no reason why it should not be
understood in a similar spirit when preserved in documents dating
from the past. Of course there is an element of indeterminacy
about all language; the lapse of time serves to increase it, and a
300-year-old text straddling two or three discourses may be very
difficult to pin down. Historians frequently acknowledge that they
cannot fathom all the levels of meaning contained in their docu-
ments. But to maintain that no text from the past can be read as

political tract

A tract is a small booklet,
larger than a pamphlet but
smaller than a book, which
puts across an argued
case. Tracts were widely
used in the nineteenth
century by church and
religious reform groups,
but there were plenty of
political tracts as well.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

an accurate reflection of something outside itself flies in the face
of common experience. In a set of trade figures or a census return
the relation between text and reality is palpable (which is not to
say that it is necessarily accurate). A carefully considered literary
production such as an autobiography or a political tract disguised
as a sermon presents much more complex problems, but it is still
important to recognize that their authors were attempting a real
engagement with their readers, and to get as close as we can to the
spirit of that engagement.

It is at this point that historians invoke the discipline of his-
torical context. The meanings that link words and things are
not arbitrary and infinite but follow conventions created by real
culture and real social relations. The task of scholarship is to
identify these conventions in their historical specificity and to
take full account of them in interpreting the sources. Whereas
exponents of the linguistic approach treat ‘context’ as meaning
other texts only, with the further complication that they too invite
a variety of readings, historians insist that texts should be set in
the full context of their time. That means taking seriously not just
the resources of the language but the identity and background of
the author, the conditions of production of texts, the intended
readership, the cultural attitudes of the time, and the social rela-
tions that enveloped writer and readers. Every text is socially
situated in specific historical conditions; in the useful phrase of
Gabrielle Spiegel, there is a ‘social logic of the text’ which is open
to demonstration by historical enquiry . 51 So, for example, my
reading of the language of late nineteenth-century imperialism
can be taken seriously because the strains in gender relations at
that time are very well documented, and because the cultural
identification of empire with masculinity bore some relation to
imperial realities. No doubt deconstruction could yield other
interpretations, more elegant and intriguing than this; but unless
they have a firm anchorage in historical context, they amount to
an imposition by the critic on the text. Respect for the historicity
of the sources is fundamental to the historical project; the point
at which it is breached is where historians part company with the
deconstructionists. Historians do not claim that in all cases their
method can uncover every dimension of textual meaning; in order
for historical work to be done, it is sufficient to demonstrate that
some of the original meaning can be reclaimed, so that we can
look beyond discourse to the material and social world in which

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

205

the texts were created. The verification of historical events and
the discipline of historical context mean that historians can dis-
tinguish between what happened in history and the discourse in
which it is represented.

The need for historical explanation

Historians are no more willing to jettison the truth claims of the
accounts that they themselves construct. It is one thing to acknowl-
edge the rhetorical aspects of historical writing but quite another
to treat it as only - or largely - rhetoric. Historical narratives are
certainly moulded by the historian’s aesthetic sense, but they are
not inventions: some, like the major revolutionary upheavals, arise
partly from the consciousness of those who lived through them;
others fall into shape through the benefit of historical hindsight.
The stories we tell ourselves about the past may not be completely
coherent or completely convincing, but they are rooted in the fact
that human beings not only believe them but enact them on the
assumption that social action is a continuum through past, present
and future. The task of historical explanation is similarly one that
cannot be shirked. It represents not an escape from the real world,
as the bleaker versions of Postmodernism insist, but an essential
application of reason, based on patterns of cause and consequence
which go beyond the confined domain of intertextuality. As for
the emancipatory potential of competing narratives, this amounts
to little if the ambitions of each identity group are confined to
producing a history that is ‘true’ only for its own members. Real
empowerment comes from writing history that carries conviction
beyond one’s own community, and this means conforming to the
scholarly procedures that historians of all communities respect.
That, rather than the consolation prize of a permissive relativism,
has been the objective of most ‘multicultural’ historians. Despite
the pessimism of some conservative commentators , 52 pluralism
does not necessarily mean relativism.

The nub of the Postmodernist critique is that historicism is
dead and should be abandoned as a serious intellectual endeavour.
In fending off this attack, historians point out not only that the
weaknesses of historical enquiry have been grossly exaggerated
but that a broadly historicist stance towards the past is cultur-
ally indispensable. It is a precondition of critical social thought
about the present and the future. As Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt

emancipatory

Liberating.

relativism

The idea that all codes
of values or ethics are
equivalent and exist in
relation to their context; it
is therefore not possible to
say that any one of them
is in any sense 'better'
than any other.

206

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

and Margaret Jacob put it, ‘Rejecting all meta-narratives cannot
make sense, because narratives and meta-narratives are the kinds
of stories that make action in the world possible ’. 53 A conscious-
ness of the past as ‘other’, a set of coherent narratives linking
past and present, and an explanatory mode of historical writing
are all practical necessities. If the ambition to know the past is
completely surrendered, we shall never be able to determine how
the present came to be. The social function of history is not to be
so lightly abandoned.

VII

Theoretical objections, practical answers

In questioning the credentials of historical knowledge,
Postmodernism has breathed fresh life into a strand of scepticism
that stretches back to the Renaissance. The fallibility (or ‘indeter-
minacy’) of the sources, the gap between validated facts and the
explanations that endow them with meaning, and the personal and
political investment that historians bring to their work, have long
been hostages to fortune. Positivism condemned them as damning
departures from scientific rigour; Postmodernism subsumes them
in a larger refutation of rational enquiry. Whether viewed from a
positivist or a Postmodern standpoint, the epistemological creden-
tials of history do not look impressive. Primarily this is because
abstract theories are best tested in carefully controlled conditions,
whereas history is a hybrid discipline that defies simple pigeon-
holing. The divergent and sometimes contradictory objectives that
historians pursue are what gives the subject its distinctive char-
acter, but they also lay it open to theoretical attack.

Though some historians still seek refuge in an untenable empir-
icism , 54 the more thoughtful defenders of the discipline concede
that it is open to major theoretical objections. Commentators
such as Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, or Richard J. Evans know
that historical knowledge always involves an encounter between
present and past in which the present may weigh too heavily on
the past. They know that the sources do not ‘speak’ directly, that
facts are selected, not given, that historical explanation depends
on the application of hindsight, and that every historical account
is in some sense moulded by the aesthetic and political prefer-
ences of the writer. Their defence rests on the contention that,

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

207

while in theory these features may invalidate historical work, in
practice they can be - and are - confined to manageable propor-
tions. History is neither an exemplar of realism nor a victim to
relativism. It occupies a middle ground in which scholarly proce-
dures are upheld in order to keep the avenues of enquiry as close
to the ‘real’ and as far removed from the ‘relative’ as possible. 55
Historians are members of a profession, one of whose principal
functions is to enforce standards of scholarship and to restrain
waywardness of interpretation. Peer-group scrutiny operates as a
powerful mechanism for ensuring that within the area of enquiry
they find significant, historians are as true as they can be to the
surviving evidence of the past.

The historian’s safeguards: self-awareness and peer
review

Three requirements stand out in this respect. First, the histo-
rian should scrutinize his or her own assumptions and values
in order to see how they relate to the enquiry in hand. One of
the attractions of E.P. Thompson is that he made no secret of
his sympathies - even acknowledging that one chapter in The
Making of the English Working Class was polemic. 56 This kind of
awareness is particularly important in the case of those historians
who have no particular axe to grind but can all too easily be
the unconscious vector of values taken for granted by people of
their own background. That is one reason why, as emphasized by
Zeldin, self-knowledge is a desirable trait among historians (see
p. 168) - and also why the confessional mode of historical writing
should be welcomed, at least in the author’s preface or introduc-
tion. Second, the risk of assimilating findings to expectations is
reduced if the direction imparted to the enquiry is cast in the form
of an explicit hypothesis, to be accepted, rejected or modified in
the light of the evidence - with the author always the first to try
to pick holes in his or her interpretation. The appropriate conduct
for historians is not to avoid social relevance but to be fully aware
of why they are attracted to their particular slice of history and to
show as much respect for contrary as for supporting evidence. It
is sometimes forgotten by non-practising critics that much of the
excitement of historical research comes from finding results that
were not anticipated and pushing one’s thesis into a new direc-
tion. Third and above all, historians must submit their work to

polemic

An angry and impassioned
argument.

208

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

peer review

Academic work is usually
scrutinized in detail by
other academics in a
process known as peer
review.

the discipline of historical context. The case against ‘presentism’
and deconstructionism is that they remove events and personali-
ties from their real time and place, forcing them into a conceptual
framework that would have meant nothing to the age in ques-
tion. In fact historians have much less excuse for falling into this
trap than they used to. The enlargement of the scope of historical
studies during the past fifty years, and the way in which the best
historical syntheses reflect this enlargement, means that historians
today should have a much better-developed sense of context than
their predecessors did; peer review operates particularly effec-
tively in this area.

Respect for these three injunctions does much to limit the
amount of distortion in historical writing. It does not, however,
put an end to debate and disagreement. It would be wrong to
suppose that if all historians could only attain a high degree
of self-awareness, make their working hypotheses explicit and
maintain a scrupulous respect for historical context they would
then concur in their historical judgements. Nobody can become
completely dispassionate about his or her own assumptions or
those of earlier ages; the evidence can usually be read in support
of conflicting hypotheses; and, since the sources never recapture
a past situation in its entirety, the sense of historical context
depends also on an imaginative flair that will vary according to
the insight and experience of the individual scholar. The nature
of historical enquiry is such that, however rigorously professional
the approach, there will always be a plurality of interpretation.
That should be counted as a strength rather than a weakness.
For advances in historical knowledge arise as much from the
play of debate between rival interpretations as from the efforts
of the individual scholar. And the same debates that enliven the
historical profession are intimately connected with the alterna-
tive visions we hold of our society in the present and the future.
If history was uncontested it would fail to provide the materials
for critical debate on the social issues of the day. Plurality of
historical interpretation is an essential - if underestimated - pre-
requisite for a mature democratic politics. The past will never be
placed beyond controversy; nor should it be.

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

209

Inductive reasoning

Historians have to achieve a balance between deductive and
inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is employed when the
conclusion is entirely supported by the information on which it
is based, known as the premise. Thus, if the premises are a) that
all cats are vertebrates and b) that Toby is a cat, we can safely
deduce that Toby is a vertebrate; indeed no other deduction is
possible. Deductive reasoning is well illustrated in the methods
adopted by the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, who once
remarked that, when all other possibilities have been eliminated,
what is left, however unlikely , must be the solution. The point
of the italics is that many people allow their expectations, drawn
from everyday experience, to influence their interpretation of
data. This is inductive reasoning. For example, a visitor to
London who saw a host of red buses and black taxis might,
understandably but still wrongly, conclude that all London buses
are red and all London taxis are black. Mathematicians rely
entirely on deductive reasoning and can be impatient of scientists’
tendency to slip into the inductive; for historians, with their often
patchy and incomplete evidence, the temptation to rely too much
on purely inductive reasoning is even stronger. Every time a
historian generalizes from a single incident or example he or she is
employing inductive reasoning, which further evidence might well
show to be mistaken.

Holocaust denial

In the closing stages of the Second World War, allied armies
overran German concentration camps and uncovered evidence of
the Nazis’ policy of exterminating Jews, Gypsies and other groups.
However, a move also got under way fuelled by extreme right-
wing and and-semitic groups in different countries to deny that
the Holocaust had ever happened. A characteristic approach of
Holocaust denial is to adopt an outwardly respectable, academic
manner and to appear to subject the evidence for the Holocaust
to careful and objective scrutiny. For example, it is often pointed
out that no document has survived with Hitler’s signature on it
ordering the murder of Jews. From this it is argued, implausibly,
that Hitler can have known nothing of the Holocaust. Holocaust
denial is based upon the systematic suppression or distortion
of the evidence. (For the court case involving David Irving, see
Chapter 2.)

►

2 1 0

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Whig history

The Whigs were a political group that dominated British politics
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Whiggery developed
out of the parliamentary side in the English Civil War and
retained a strong attachment to the rights and privileges of
Parliament, whose virtues, the Whigs believed, could be explained
by a particular reading of English history. The Whigs interpreted
it as a long battle with the Crown for the restoration of the
ancient rights of Parliament, which they fondly believed had
been enjoyed in Anglo-Saxon times but lost at the time of the
Norman Conquest. Elistorians have long since shown the Whig
version of events to be myth, but the general theme of progress
towards a pinnacle in the present day remained very popular.
Herbert Butterfield attacked Whig history for looking at medieval
or Tudor institutions in entirely modern terms and not taking
the contemporary context into account; left-wing historians have
rejected Whig history for its over-confident, patriotic tone. The
general Whig tendency, however, to see modern conditions or
attitudes as the peak of perfection and then to look to the past to
see how we attained it, is by no means confined to constitutional
history and can be found in such diverse fields as women’s history
or the history of science and medicine.

Further reading

E.H. Carr, What is History ?, Penguin, 1961.

G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, Fontana, 1969.

W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History, 3rd edn,
Hutchinson, 1967.

Richard Evans, In Defence of History, Granta, 1997.

Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice, Arnold, 2000.

R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1946.

Keith Jenkins, On ‘What is History?’, Routledge, 1995.

Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, Routledge, 1997.

Beverley Southgate, Postmodernism in History, Routledge, 2003.

Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987.

Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about
History, Norton, 1997.

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

2 1 1

Notes

1 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, Fontana, 1969.

2 Theodore Zeldin, ‘Ourselves as we see us’, Times Literary
Supplement, 31 December 1982. See also his article, ‘After Braudel’,
The Listener, 5 November 1981.

3 See, for example, Elton, The Practice of History, pp. vii-viii.

4 Lee Benson, Toward the Scientific Study of History, Lippincott,

1972.

5 L. von Ranke, quoted in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The
‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession,
Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 28.

6 Zeldin, ‘After Braudel’. See also his article, ‘Social and total history’,
Journal of Social History, X, 1976, pp. 237-45.

7 K.R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies , vol. II, 5th edn,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, p. 265.

8 Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory,
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, editor’s introduction, p. xlv.

9 E.H. Carr, What is History ?, Penguin, 1964, p. 16, rather surprisingly
falls into this error.

10 Lord Acton, letter to the contributors to the Cambridge Modern
History, 1896, reprinted in Fritz Stern (ed.), Varieties of History, 2nd
edn, Macmillan, 1970, p. 247.

11 Carr, What is History ? p. 120.

12 L.B. Namier, Avenues of History, Elamish Hamilton, 1952, p. 8.

13 M.M. Postan, Fact and Relevance, Cambridge University Press, 1970,
p. 51.

14 Elton, Practice of History, pp. 74-82.

15 See R.C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution
Revisited, Routledge, 1988.

16 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Manchester University Press,

1954, p. 65.

17 Popper’s views are lucidly expounded in Bryan Magee, Popper,
Fontana, 1973.

18 Joseph C. Miller ‘History and Africa/Africa and History’, American
Historical Review, CIV, 1999, p. 27.

19 R.F. Holland, European Decolonization 1918-81, Macmillan, 1985.

20 James Joll, The Origins of the First World War, Longman, 1984.

21 Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,
Phaidon, 1960, p. 1.

22 This is particularly true of Elton, Practice of History.

2 1 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

23 Richard Cobb, A Second Identity, Oxford University Press, 1969,
p. 47. See also Zeldin’s comments in the same vein in France
1848-1945, vol. I, Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 7.

24 See, for example, Pieter Geyl, Napoleon: For and Against, 2nd edn,
Cape, 1964.

25 Compare, for example, Peter Laslett, The World We Flave Lost,

2nd edn, Methuen, 1971, with E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters,
Penguin, 1977.

26 Michael Howard, The Lessons of History, Oxford University Press,
1981, p. 21.

27 J.B. Bury, ‘The science of history’, 1902, reprinted in Stern, Varieties
of History, p. 215.

28 Adrian Wilson, ‘The infancy of the history of childhood: an appraisal
of Philippe Aries’, History and Theory, XIX, 1980, pp. 132-53.

29 H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, Penguin, 1973,
p. 30.

30 Cf. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden frorn History, Pluto Press, 1973.

31 Cited in J.H. Hexter, On Historians, Collins, 1979, p. 15.

32 Gordon Connell-Smith and Howell A. Lloyd, The Relevance of
History, Heinemann, 1972, p. 41.

33 Elton, Practice of History, p. 31.

34 Elton’s conservative convictions are most clearly set out in his two
inaugural lectures, ‘The future of the past’ (1968) and ‘The history
of England’ (1984), reprinted in his Return to Essentials, Cambridge
University Press, 1991.

35 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana, 1977, pp. 42-8.

36 The textual theories that have grown up in the wake of Saussure
are usefully set out in Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter
Brookes, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 4th
edn, Prentice Hall, 1997.

37 For a good introduction, see P. Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader,
Penguin, 1991.

38 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press,
1976, p. 158.

39 Raphael Samuel, ‘Reading the signs’, History Workshop Journal,
xxxii, 1991, p. 93.

40 Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1987, p. 72.

41 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistock, 1972.

42 Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History, Routledge, 1991, p. 68.

43 Hayden White, quoted in Novick, That Noble Dream, p. 601.

THE LIMITS OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE

2 1 3

44 See, for example, Alun Munslow, Deconstructing History, Routledge,
1997; Keith Jenkins, On ‘What is History?’, Routledge, 1995.

45 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837, Yale
University Press, 1992, is a good example of a highly critical analysis
uninfluenced by Postmodernism.

46 For attacks on the Whig interpretation of history, see J.C.D. Clark,
English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political
Practice during the Ancien Regime, Cambridge University Press,

1985, and Conrad Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War,
Oxford University Press, 1990. For attacks on the concept of the
Industrial Revolution, see R. Floud and D. McCloskey (eds), The
Economic History of Britain since 1700, 2 vols, Cambridge University
Press, 1981.

47 Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English
Working Class History 1832-1982, Cambridge University Press,

1983, p. 107.

48 H. John Field, Toward a Programme of Imperial Life, Clio Press,
1982; John Tosh, ‘What should historians do with masculinity?
Reflections on nineteenth-century Britain’, History Workshop Journal,
XXXVIII, 1994, pp. 179-202.

49 For a review of these trends, see Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives
on Historical Writing, Polity Press, 1991.

50 See, for example, Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History,
Columbia University Press, 1988.

51 Gabrielle M. Spiegel, ‘History, historicism, and the social logic of the
text’, Speculum, LXV (1990), pp. 59-86.

52 Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Looking Into the Abyss, Knopf, 1994.

53 Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth
About History, Norton, 1994, p. 236.

54 Elton, Return to Essentials; Arthur Marwick, ‘Two approaches to
historical study: the metaphysical (including “Postmodernism”) and
the historical ’, Journal of Contemporary History, XXX, 1995,

pp. 5-35.

55 Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, Telling the Truth About History; Richard
J. Evans, In Defence of History, Granta, 1997.

56 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, revised
edn, Penguin, 1968, p. 916.

CHAPTER EIGHT

History and social theory

What role should theory play in the work of a historian? Some
approach history from a Marxist point of view and find that the
application of social theory helps to make sense of a past that
might otherwise defy analysis. However, others see such theorizing
as dangerous, twisting the facts to fit the theory. This chapter
considers the relationship between history and different social
theories. It suggests that Marxism in particular might have rather
more to offer the historian than its detractors have allowed for.

I suggested in the previous chapter that one of the ways in which
historians can guard against unconsciously assimilating their
interpretations of the past to their own bias is by formulating
hypotheses to be tested against the available evidence. Such a
hypothesis may be no more than a provisional explanation sug-
gested to the historian by a reading of the relevant secondary
authorities and exclusive to the historical problem in hand. But
a closer inspection often reveals a more elevated parentage. A
hypothesis is not just a preliminary assessment of a particular
historical conjuncture in its own terms; it usually reflects certain
assumptions about the nature of society and the nature of culture;
in other words, historical hypotheses amount to an application of
theory. In many disciplines ‘theory’ represents the abstracting of
generalizations (sometimes laws) from an accumulation of research
findings. Historians hardly ever use the term in this sense. Theory
for them usually means the framework of interpretation that gives
impetus to an enquiry and influences its outcome. Historians
sharply differ about the legitimacy of this procedure. Some are
strongly committed to a particular theoretical orientation; some

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

acknowledge the stimulus that a theoretical point of departure can
offer, while resisting any imposition of theory on the historical
evidence; others regard any use of theory as an insidious encroach-
ment on the autonomy of history as a discipline.

The current practice of history is strongly influenced by two
quite distinct bodies of theory. The more recent addresses the
problem of meaning and representation. Traditionally historians
have relied on their techniques of source criticism in order to
capture the meanings that people in the past have given to their
experience. Yet the more remote and alienating the experience,
the more inadequate that methodology becomes. As the scope
of cultural history has broadened, historians have increasingly
acknowledged the insights of other disciplines - psychoanalysis,
literary theory and above all cultural anthropology. Chapter 9 will
examine more fully the problems of interpreting cultural meaning
and the debt that many historians now acknowledge towards these
disciplines. The second body of theory seeks to understand whole
societies: how they hold together, and how they change over time
(or not, as the case may be). It comprises an extraordinarily rich
intellectual tradition, going back at least to the Enlightenment.
In practice no historian seeking to understand the major changes
in the pre-modern and modern world can afford to ignore social
theory. That is the main reason why Marxism has been so influen-
tial, and why it continues to be so despite its collapse as a political
programme. In this chapter I first review the general debate about
the merits and demerits of social theory; I then examine Marxism
and its application in some detail.

I

The need for abstract theory

Broadly speaking, social theories arise from the problems presented
by three aspects of historical explanation. There is first the diffi-
culty of grasping the inter-relatedness of every dimension of human
experience at a given time. For most historians up to the end of
the nineteenth century this was not in practice a major problem,
since their interest tended to be confined to political and constitu-
tional history; accordingly some notion of the body politic was all
the conceptual equipment they required. But during the twentieth
century the enlargement in the scope of historical enquiry and in

cultural anthropology

The study of the cultural
meanings by which people
live in society (usually
small-scale societies).

2 1 6

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

the volume of evidence, together with the pressures towards the-
matic specialization, demanded an ever greater capacity to think in
terms of abstractions. We saw in Chapter 3 how easily historians
fall into the trap of seeing the past as compartmentalized into
‘political’, ‘economic’, ‘intellectual’ and ‘social’ history, and how
the idea of ‘total history’ arose as a corrective (see p. 83). But total
history is unattainable without some concept of how the compo-
nent aspects of human experience are linked together to form a
whole - some theory of the structure of human society in its widest
sense. Most concepts of this kind depend heavily on analogies with
the physical world. Society has been variously conceived as an
organism, a mechanism and a structure. Each of these metaphors
represents an attempt to go beyond the crude notion that any one
sphere determines the rest, and to express the reciprocal or mutu-
ally reinforcing relationship between the main categories of human
action and thought.

Identifying the motor of historical change

demography

The study of the growth
and development of
population.

gradualist

Proceeding slowly, making
very gradual progress.

The second problem that invites the application of theory is
that of historical change. Historians spend most of their time
explaining change - or its absence. This dominant preoccupation
inevitably raises the question of whether the major transitions
in history display common characteristics. Is historical change
driven by a motor, and if so what does the motor consist of?
More specifically, does industrialization require adherence to
one particular path of economic development? Can one identify
in history the essential components of a revolutionary situation?
In framing their hypotheses in particular instances historians are
often influenced by the attractions of this kind of theory - for
example the idea that demography holds the key 1 or that the
most durable changes in society arise from the gradualist reforms
conceded by paternalistic ruling classes rather than from revolu-
tionary demands articulated from below. 2

paternalistic

Instituting changes and
reforms from 'on high',
i.e. carried out by those
in authority for those
below them, rather
than introduced by the
beneficiaries themselves.

Seeking the meaning of history

Third, and most ambitiously, there are the theories that seek
to explain not merely how historical change takes place but
the direction in which all change is moving; these theories are
concerned to interpret human destiny by ascribing a meaning to

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

history. Medieval writers conceived history as a linear transition
from the Creation to the Last Judgement, controlled by Divine
Providence. By the eighteenth century that view had been secu-
larized as the idea of progress: history was interpreted as a story
of material and intellectual improvement whose outcome in the
future would be the triumph of reason and human happiness.
Modified versions of that outlook continued to have a powerful
hold in the nineteenth century: on the European continent history
meant the rise of national identities and their political expression
in the nation-state; for the Whig historians of England it meant
the growth of constitutional liberties. Full-blown professions of
faith in progress may be rare today , 3 given the trail of destruction
that marked the history of the twentieth century; but theories of
progressive change still underpin many historical interpretations
in the economic and social sphere, as is shown by the frequency
with which historians reach for such words as ‘industrialization’
and ‘modernization’.

The rejection of theory

Although these three types of historical theory are analytically
distinct, they all share an interest in moving from the particular
to the general in an effort to make sense of the subject as a whole.
It might be supposed that this is a natural progression, shared by
all branches of knowledge. A great many historians, however,
reject the use of theory completely. They see two possible grounds
for doing so. The first argument concedes that there may be pat-
terns and regularities in history but maintains that they are not
accessible to disciplined enquiry. It is hard enough to provide an
entirely convincing explanation of any one event in history, but
to link them in a series or within an overarching category places
the enquirer at an intolerable distance from the verifiable facts. As
Peter Mathias (here acting as devil’s advocate) concedes:

The bounty of the past provides individual instances in plenty to
support virtually any general proposition. It is only too easy to beat
history over the head with the blunt instrument of a hypothesis and
leave an impression . 4

On this view, theoretical history is speculative history and should
be left to philosophers and prophets . 5

The possibility that theory will ‘take over’ from the facts is cer-
tainly not to be made light of. The gaps in the surviving historical

2 1 7

devil's advocate

One who deliberately sets
out to put the opposite
case for the purposes of
debate. The term comes
from the process whereby
the Vatican used to decide
on proposals for creating a
new saint, where the devil's
advocate presented the
case against the candidate.

2 1 8

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

acquiescence

Acceptance.

record, and especially the lack of clinching evidence in matters of
causation, leave a great deal of scope for mere supposition and
wishful thinking. At the same time, the range of evidence bearing
on many historical problems is so large that selection is unavoid-
able - and the principles governing that selection may prejudice
the result of the enquiry. The record of recent centuries is so
voluminous and varied that contradictory results can be obtained
simply by asking different questions. In the context of American
history, Aileen Kraditor puts this point as follows:

If one historian asks, ‘Do the sources provide evidence of militant
struggles among workers and slaves?’ the sources will reply,
‘Certainly’. And if another asks, ‘Do the sources provide evidence of
widespread acquiescence in the established order among the American
population throughout the past two centuries?’ the sources will reply,
‘Of course ’. 6

Almost any theory can be ‘proved’ by marshalling an impressive
collection of individual instances to fit the desired pattern.

Safeguards against excessive theorizing

Theory-oriented history is certainly prone to these dangers - but
so too, it must be recognized, is the work of many historians who
reject theory and remain blissfully unaware of the assumptions
and values that inform their own selection and interpretation of
evidence. The way forward is not to retreat into an untenable
empiricism but to apply much higher standards to the testing of
theory. Wishful thinking is more likely to be controlled by histo-
rians who approach their enquiries with explicit hypotheses than
by those who try to follow where the sources lead. When selec-
tion of the evidence cannot be avoided, it must be a representative
selection which will reveal both contrary and supporting indica-
tors. A given theory may account for part of the evidence relating
to the problem in hand, but that is not enough; it must be compat-
ible with the weight of the evidence overall. In Kraditor’s words,
‘the data omitted must not be essential to the understanding of the
data included ’. 7 All this assumes a certain detachment on the part
of historians towards their theories, and a readiness to change
tack because of the lack of evidence. But where these controls are
neglected, the profession as a whole is vigilant in their defence.
Historians are seldom happier than when citing contrary evidence
and alternative interpretations to cast doubt on the work of their

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

2 1 9

colleagues - especially those who seem to have a bee in their
bonnet. Moreover, a great deal of historical synthesis consists of
comparing the merits of competing theories in order to determine
which, if any, illuminates the problem under discussion. The
speculative tendencies in theoretical history do not go unchecked
for long.

II

Is theory relevant to historical enquiry?

The second and more challenging line of attack questions the
legitimacy of theory-making in history on the grounds that it
denies the very essence of the discipline. Human culture, the argu-
ment goes, is so richly diverse that we can only understand man in
specific epochs and locations: ‘He remains an irreducible subject,
the one non-object in the world ’. 8 Models of human behaviour are
therefore a delusion. The business of the historian is to reconstruct
events and situations in their unique individuality, and on their
own terms; their interpretations apply only to particular sets of
circumstances. Nothing is to be gained from comparing historical
situations separated by time or space - indeed a great deal will be
lost, since the result can only be to obscure the essentials of each. In
David Thomson’s words, ‘The historical attitude, by definition, is
hostile to system-making’. 9 This view has a distinguished pedigree.
It captures the essence of historicism as expounded in the nine-
teenth century. Ranke’s injunction that historians should study the
past ‘to show how things actually were’ was intended primarily as
an antidote to the great evolutionary schemes of the Enlightenment
historians and the followers of Hegel. Ranke’s narrative style was
hostile to abstraction and generalization and well suited to con-
veying the particularity of events. The classical historicist position
is inimical both to comprehensive theories of social structure and
to theories of social change, while its demand that every age should
be evaluated in its own terms is difficult to reconcile with any view
of history as progress towards a desirable goal.

The dangers of determinism

These grounds for rejecting theories of history are closely related
to another argument which has often been given heavy emphasis:

220

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

that theory denies not only the ‘uniqueness’ of events but also
the dignity of the individual and the power of human agency.
Traditional narrative shorn of any explanatory framework gives
maximum scope to the play of personality, whereas a concern
with recurrent or typical aspects of social structure and social
change elevates abstraction at the expense of real living indi-
viduals. Worst of all from this viewpoint are theories of the third
kind, whose insidious effect is to confer an inevitability on the
historical process which individuals are powerless to change,
now or in the future; all theories of history, the argument goes,
have determinist elements, and determinism is a denial of human
freedom . 10 The polar opposite of determinism is the rejection of
any meaning in history beyond the play of the contingent and the
unforeseen - a view held by many historians in the mainstream
of the discipline. A.J.P. Taylor delighted in informing his readers
that the only lesson taught by the study of the past is the incoher-
ence and unpredictability of human affairs: history is a chapter of
accidents and blunders . 11

Lastly, the traditionalists recoil from one of the main prac-
tical consequences of writing theory-oriented history, which is to
place history in a dependent relationship with the social sciences.
Theory-minded historians, they maintain, do not develop their
own models but apply the theoretical findings of sociology, social
anthropology and economics - disciplines whose focus is on the
present not the past, and who are interested in history only as
a testing ground for their own theories. Theoretical historians
simply play into their hands and undermine the autonomy of
their own discipline. Historians ought to be vigilant about threats
to the distinctiveness of their calling, whether from within or
without . 12

The conservatism of historians

The views of the traditionalists - sometimes expressed intem-
perately - suggests one explanation as to why the historical
profession has been so strongly averse to theory, and that is its
conservatism . 13 The study of history has attracted more than its
fair share of conservatives concerned to invoke the sanction of
the past in defence of institutions threatened by radical reform, or
quite simply to find a mental escape from the disorienting impact
of rapid social change around them. The true conservative, lacking

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

2 2 1

a vision of progress, distrusts theories of the meaning of history as
the rhetoric of the Utopian Left and is alarmed by the notion of a
general model of social change which might be employed to push
through undesirable projects of social engineering in the future.
But the research methods of historians themselves have also acted
as a strong antidote to theory. As M.M. Postan put it, the

critical attitude to minutiae has become in the end a powerful agent
of selection. It now attracts to history persons of a cautious and
painstaking disposition, not necessarily endowed with any aptitude
for theoretical synthesis . 14

In fact a great deal of the opposition to theory is born of prejudice.
The negative tendencies that the traditionalists have identified are
certainly there and if allowed free rein would lead to the damaging
consequences that alarm them so much; but as any examination
of the better examples of theoretical history will show, these ten-
dencies do not go unchecked, and the outcome is an enrichment
rather than an impoverishment of historical understanding.

Utopian

Unrealistically idealistic.
The term comes from
Sir Thomas More's book
Utopia, which imagines a
perfect but unattainable
society. 'Utopia', derived
from the Creek u-topos,
means 'no such place'.

minutiae

Very small details.

The need to generalize

Consider, first of all, the contention that theory detracts from
the uniqueness of historical events. Historians have in fact never
written of events as though they were entirely unique, because it
is impossible to do so. The very language that historians employ
imposes a classification on their material and implies comparisons
beyond their immediate field of interest. The only reason why
scholars can use the phrase ‘feudal tenure’ of a particular rela-
tionship between lord and tenant, or the word ‘revolution’ of a
major political upheaval, is because they share with their readers
a common notion of what those words mean, based on a recog-
nition that the world would be incomprehensible if we did not
all the time subsume particular instances into general categories.
The point was clearly made by E.E. Evans-Pritchard, the leading
figure in the last generation of British social anthropologists, who
advocated a cordial relationship between history and the social
sciences:

Events lose much, even all, of their meaning if they are not seen as
having some degree of regularity and constancy, as belonging to a
certain type of event, all instances of which have many features in
common. King John’s struggle with his barons is meaningful only

2 2 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

when the relations of the barons to Henry I, Stephen, Henry II,
and Richard are also known; and also when the relations between
the kings and barons in other countries with feudal institutions are
known; in other words, where the struggle is seen as a phenomenon
typical of, or common to, societies of a certain kind . 15

But if the use of generalizing concepts alerts us to regularities in
the material, it also exposes those aspects that resist categoriza-
tion and which give the event or situation its unique qualities. The
contention of the theoretical historian is that if these comparisons
are implicit in any historical analysis worth the name, then there
is everything to be gained in clarity of thought by making them
explicit - by constructing, for example, a model of feudal society
or of revolutionary change.

Is history concerned with individuals?

Equally, the claim that history is the rightful province of the
individual looks dangerously misleading on closer inspection.
Historians are compelled at every turn to classify people into
groups, whether by nationality, religion, occupation or class. This
is because it is these larger identities that confer significance on
them as social beings. And what these groups have in common is a
tendency to think and act in certain ways, to the point where their
response can be predicted. No two individuals are ever entirely
alike, but how they behave in certain roles (e.g. as consumers of
foodstuffs or as adherents of a particular creed) may follow a
highly regular pattern. The emphasis that historians place on group
activity is not, therefore, a denial of human individuality but simply
a recognition that what the individual does in common with others
usually has far greater impact, historically, than anything else he
or she does. Furthermore, the cumulative effect of the actions that
a particular group takes in pursuit of its objectives is to institution-
alize that behaviour - that is, to entrench it in such a way that the
options open to individuals thereafter are constrained or (to use a
useful sociological term) structured. This is not the same as saying
that people’s actions are determined: certain patterns of behaviour
may be strongly indicated, but they can be rejected or modified
by the resolve of a new generation to break out of the mould. No
one has expressed the tension between human agency and social
structuring more lucidly than Philip Abrams, who significantly
combined the professions of historian and sociologist:

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

2 2 3

When we refer to the two-sidedness of society we are referring to the
ways in which, in time, actions become institutions and institutions
are in turn changed by action. Taking and selling prisoners becomes
the institution of slavery. Offering one’s services to a soldier in return
for his protection becomes feudalism. Organizing the control of an
enlarged labour force on the basis of standardized rules becomes
bureaucracy. And slavery, feudalism and bureaucracy become the
fixed, external settings in which struggles for prosperity or survival or
freedom are then pursued. By substituting cash payments for labour
services the lord and peasant jointly embark on the dismantling of the
feudal order their great-grandparents had constructed . 16

The best theories - and I will argue shortly that Marxism is one
of these - owe their appeal precisely to the fact that they acknowl-
edge and seek to elucidate the reciprocal relationship of action
and structure. Theory does not devalue the individual; it seeks
rather to explain the constraints that limit people’s freedom and
frustrate their intentions, and in doing so it uncovers patterns in
history. By contrast, the historian who maintains an exclusive
focus on the thoughts and actions of individuals (as diplomatic
historians all too often do) is likely to find no shape and to see
instead only a chaotic sequence of accident and blunder.

Lessons from social science

As for the threatened submergence of history by the social sci-
ences, there are strong reasons why historians should - in the
first instance at least - avail themselves of imported theory. The
social sciences are by definition concerned with what people do
in aggregates rather than as individuals; and since their range
embraces entire societies, social scientists have from the outset
needed theory in order to engage with their subject matter at all.
Economists since Adam Smith in the late eighteenth century and
sociologists since Auguste Comte in the mid-nineteenth century
have regarded explicit theory as a prerequisite for interpreting
their data, and as a result a body of sophisticated theoretical
knowledge has been built up in both disciplines, and latterly in
social anthropology too. The use made by historians of these theo-
ries is simply an acknowledgement that the social sciences have a
head start. In fact history has always been influenced by theorists
from without, Smith and Comte being cases in point. But it is
only in the past fifty years that historians have begun to take the
measure of the full range and versatility of social science theory.

Adam Smith (1723-90)

Scottish economist. Smith
is the most important of
the eighteenth-century
neo-classical school of
economic theory; his
1 776 work The Wealth
of Nations is generally
credited with having
invented the modern
study of economics. Smith
held that economies are
governed by a 'hidden
hand' of market forces and
therefore thrive best when
government regulation
and interference are kept
to a minimum.

Auguste Comte
(1798-1857)

French political
philosopher and founder
of the positivist school.
Positivism aims to
integrate the different
branches of knowledge
into a coherent whole.

224

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

ahistorical

In breach of the rules of
the historical discipline,
e.g. by dealing with
historical events out of
context, or even in the
wrong context.

There are two real problems here. One is that much social
science theory, especially in economics, is intended to explain quite
restricted fields of activity, often in a somewhat artificially detached
way, and the result of applying this theory to historical work may
be to intensify the ‘tunnel vision’ to which historians specializing
in a particular branch are anyway so prone. An extreme case was
the use of statistical economic models in economic history. Known
as ‘Cliometrics’, high hopes were expressed for this approach in
the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Cliometrics was
based on the belief that a national economy is a closed system,
entirely explicable in terms of statistical models, and that the
same laws that appear to explain economic change in the present
applied in the past also. The main drawback to this approach was
that it started from the premise that human beings in seeking to
fulfil their material needs are governed by motives of a ‘rational’
profit-maximizing, cost-cutting kind. Yet often this is exactly what
needs to be demonstrated, not assumed, since economic activity
may be influenced by non-economic factors. The limitations of
Cliometrics were sharply exposed when it was applied to the slave
system of the American South in R.W. Fogel and S.L. Engerman’s
Time on the Cross (1974). 17 A theory that explains human behav-
iour in ‘ideal’ conditions is unlikely to do so when confronted by
the social and cultural factors that obtain in a historically specific
situation, and historians who insist on using such a theory on the
grounds that they are interested in purely technical problems are
afflicted by a particularly disabling form of ‘tunnel vision’.

The other problem concerns the alleged indifference to history
of the social sciences. This charge is not without foundation.
Many theories, for example that of the free-market economy,
are based on the premise of equilibrium, which strikes historians
as a profoundly ahistorical way of conceiving society - a denial
of the trajectories of change and adjustment that are present in
every case; and other theories (such as the modernization theory
so prevalent in American sociology) which purport to embrace a
historical dimension are based on a naive antithesis between ‘tra-
ditional’ and ‘modern’, which is at odds with any sense of process
in history. Certainly much of the borrowing by historians from
the social sciences has been shallow and uncritical, and it has too
readily assumed that theory is somehow value-free and objective,
whereas it is the subject of sharp ideological differences among
social scientists themselves. 18

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

2 2 5

JO!l N LILHURN'F. ON THK PIU.ORY.

Neither of these objections is a reason for avoiding theory;
they suggest only that historians should be discriminating about
what they take on board. In fact the theories whose influence on
recent historians has been particularly pervasive are those that
seek to encompass social structure or social change as a whole,
and of these theories the most influential are derived from the
great social thinkers of the nineteenth century, who had a pro-
found sense of history - Max Weber and above all Karl Marx.
But the real answer to the traditionalists’ fear of absorption by the
social sciences is that these theories are not tablets from heaven to
be inscribed on the historical record. They should be seen rather
as a point of departure. The result of historical work will be to
modify them, probably quite drastically, and to erect in their
place theories that represent a genuine cross-fertilization between
history and social science. Both sides can only benefit from that

John Lilburne, political
agitator and English
leader of the Levellers
in the 1640s. Here, he
appeals to a crowd as he
stands at a pillory.

(Mary Evans Picture
Library)

outcome.

226

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

shibboleth

(Hebrew) A derogatory
term for a slogan or
catchphrase.

Ill

The case against Marxist history

The way is now open for a discussion in which the Marxist inter-
pretation of history can be assessed in the context of the dangers
and opportunities that attend any venture in theoretical history.
The dangers in this case are familiar enough: Marx’s detractors
have made such play with some of the less attractive tendencies
in his thought that, to all except the fairly restricted number of
people who have read Marx himself or academic commentaries
on his writings, he is associated with a bleak determinism and an
utter cynicism about human nature. On this reading, the central
tenets of Marxism go something like this. ‘History is subject to
the inexorable control of economic forces, which move all human
societies along the road to socialism through the same stages,
capitalism being the stage currently occupied by most of human-
kind. At all times material self-interest has been the mainspring of
human behaviour, regardless of the motives people have actually
professed. Classes represent the collective expression of this self-
interest, and all history is therefore nothing more than the history
of class conflict. Ideology, art and culture are merely a mirror of
this fundamental identification, having no historical dynamic of
their own. The individual is the product of his or her own age
and class, and however talented and forceful is powerless to affect
the course of history; it is the masses who make history, but even
they only do so according to a predetermined pattern.’ At one
time or another in the hundred years or so that have elapsed since
Marx’s death, each of these propositions has been subscribed to
by Marxists, but all of them represent a crude simplification of
what he actually wrote. Marx’s thought was developed over some
thirty years of research and reflection, and the resulting corpus
of theory is far more complex and subtle than the shibboleths of
‘vulgar’ Marxism allow.

The basis of Marxist theory

Marx began with the fundamental premise that what distin-
guishes people from animals is their ability to produce their
means of subsistence. In the struggle to satisfy their physiological
and material needs, men and women have developed progres-
sively more efficient means of exploiting their environment (or

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

227

mastering nature, as Marx would have put it). To the question
‘What is history about?’ Marx answered that it was about the
growth of human productive power, and he looked forward to
the time when the basic needs of all people would be amply satis-
fied: only then would humanity find self-fulfilment and achieve its
full potential in every sphere. In maintaining that the only true,
objective view of the historical process was rooted in the mate-
rial conditions of life, Marx sharply distinguished himself from
the main currents of nineteenth-century historiography with their
choice of nationalism, freedom or religion as the defining themes
of history. It is entirely appropriate that Marx’s view should be
referred to as ‘historical materialism’, a term coined by his life-
long collaborator and intellectual heir, Friedrich Engels. From this
basic perspective, first sketched in The German Ideology (1846),
Marx never wavered. For the rest of his life much of his effort was
devoted to working out its implications for the interpretation of
social structure, the stages of social evolution, and the nature of
social change.

Marx’s analysis of society

Marx conceived of society as comprising three constituent levels.
Underlying all else are the forces of production (or productive
forces): that is, the tools, techniques and raw materials together
with the labour power that realizes their productive potential.
The forces of production have certain implications for the rela-
tions of production (or productive relations), by which Marx
meant the division of labour and the forms of cooperation and
subordination required to sustain production - in other words the
economic structure of society. This structure in turn forms a base
or foundation on which is built the superstructure, composed of
legal and political institutions and their supporting ideology. The
most succinct summary of Marx’s view of social structure appears
in the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859):

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter
into definite relations, which are independent of their will,
namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the
development of their material forces of production. The totality of
these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of
society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political

228

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness . 19

A determinist model?

However, this is not the crudely deterministic model that it has so
often been taken to be. First, the forces of production are by no
means confined to the instruments of production and the brawn
of the workers. Technical ingenuity and scientific knowledge (on
which the further development of the forces of production so
clearly depended by Marx’s day) are also included: full allowance
is made for human creativity, without which we would remain
slaves of the natural world around us. Second, although it clearly
follows from Marx’s view that politics and ideology - the tradi-
tional preoccupations of the historian - can only be understood
in relation to the economic base, Marx also allowed for influences
in the reverse direction. For example, no system of economic
relations can become established without a prior framework of
property rights and legal obligations; that is to say, the super-
structure does not just reflect the relations of production but has
an enabling function as well. The three-tier model thus allows
for reciprocal influences. 20 And third, Marx did not suggest that
all non-economic activities were determined by the base. It is
arguable whether artistic creation should be included in the super-
structure at all. But even those spheres that belong unequivocally
to the superstructure are not exclusively determined by the base.
Both political institutions and religion have their own dynamic, as
Marx and Engels acknowledged in their own historical writings,
and in the short term especially economic factors may be of sub-
sidiary importance in accounting for events; as Braudel observes,
Marx was essentially a theorist of la longue duree (see p. 164). 21

It is probably closer to the spirit of Marx’s thought to see
the economic structure as setting limiting conditions rather than
determining the elements of the superstructure in all their particu-
larity. Engels was most emphatic on this point. As he wrote to a
correspondent some years after Marx’s death:

According to the materialistic conception of history, the ultimately
determining element in history is the production and reproduction of
real life.

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

229

More than this neither Marx nor I has ever asserted. Hence
if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is
the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a
meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the
basis, but the various elements of the superstructure . . . also exercise
their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many
cases preponderate in determining their form . 11

oeuvre

(French) An author's
complete works.

Clearly the base/superstructure metaphor lends itself to a deter-
ministic interpretation, and several of Marx’s utterances can be
so interpreted, but his oeuvre as a whole does not suggest that he
saw it in such stark terms.

Marx’s analysis of history

One of the best-known features of Marx’s thought is his periodi-
zation of history. He distinguished three historical epochs down
to his own day, each moulded by a progressively more advanced
mode of production. These were Ancient Society (Greece and
Rome), Feudal Society, which emerged after the fall of the Roman
Empire, and Capitalist (or ‘modern bourgeois’) Society, which
had first come into being in England in the seventeenth century
and had since triumphed elsewhere in Europe, particularly as a
consequence of the French Revolution. What gave political edge
to the periodization was Marx’s conviction that Capitalist Society
must in due course give way to Socialist Society and the complete
self-fulfilment of humankind; indeed when he first sketched the
scheme in 1846 he believed the advent of socialism to be immi-
nent. Marx maintained that his periodization was the outcome of
his historical enquiries rather than of dogmatic theorizing, and
that is borne out by the changes and qualifications he made in
the light of fuller research. He later posited an additional mode
of production in the form of Germanic Society, contemporaneous
with Ancient Society and one of the sources of Feudal Society. 23
Marx reproved those critics who

must metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism
in Western Europe into a historic-philosophic theory of the
general path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical
circumstances in which it finds itself . 24

In short, Marx did not lay down a single evolutionary path which
all human societies are predetermined to follow exactly.

2 3 0

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Dialectic in production as the motor of social
change

Such a rigid periodization would have ill consorted with Marx’s
view of social change, the richest and most suggestive part of
his theory of history. Marx summed up his interpretation in
the passage that immediately follows the extract from the 1859
preface quoted earlier:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of
society come into conflict with the existing relations of production
or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the
property relations within the framework of which they have operated
hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces
these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social
revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or
later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure . 23

Marx believed that the contradiction or dialectic between the
forces of production and the relations of production was the
principal determinant of long-term historical change: each mode
of production contains within it the seeds of its successor. Thus,
to take an example on which he held emphatic views, the English
Revolution of the seventeenth century occurred because the forces
of production characteristic of capitalism had reached the point
where their further development was held back by the feudal
property relations sanctioned by the early Stuart monarchy; the
outcome of the Revolution was a remodelling of the relations of
production, which cleared the way for the Industrial Revolution
a hundred years later.

Class conflict

This rather abstract conception of historical change is made visible
in the form of class conflict. Marx identified classes not according
to wealth, status or education - the usual criteria employed in his
day - but quite specifically in terms of their role in the produc-
tive process. The division of labour that has characterized every
mode of production since Ancient Society results in the creation of
classes whose true interests are mutually antagonistic. Each suc-
cessive stage has had its dominant class and has also harboured
the class destined to overthrow it. Thus Marx ascribed the English
Revolution to the urban bourgeoisie, who were developing the

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

2 3 1

new capitalist forces of production, just as he expected socialism
to be achieved in his own day by the new factory proletariat
spawned by industrial capitalism. It is class conflict expressing
the contradictions within society that drives history in a forward
direction. This is not to say that the masses are the makers of
history. Although Marx believed that humanity’s prospects for a
better future lay in the hands of the proletariat, his interpretation
confined the masses to an ancillary role in earlier history; he was
only too well aware that the world in which he lived was essen-
tially the creation of the bourgeoisie, whom Marx both admired
and reviled for what they had achieved.

Marx’s conception of class is the point at which his view of the
role of human agency in history can be assessed. Class is defined
in structural terms according to its relation to the means of pro-
duction, but Marx knew that for a class to be effective politically
requires a consciousness of their class in its members. The long-
term trajectory of change may be determined by the dialectic
between the forces and relations of production, but the timing
and the precise form of the transition from one stage to the next
depend on the awareness and capacity for action of real human
beings. Indeed, Marx’s entire career was devoted to equipping
the proletariat of his time with an understanding of the mate-
rial forces at work in their own society so that they would know
when and how to act against the capitalist system. People are the
victims of material forces, but in the right conditions they have
the opportunity to be agents of historical change. That paradox
lies at the centre of Marx’s view of history. As he wrote in his
finest piece of contemporary history, ‘The eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte’ (1852):

proletariat

The industrial working
class. The term passed into
general use after it was
popularized in the writings
of Karl Marx.

ancillary

Secondary, subordinate.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as
they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and
transmitted from the past . 26

How Marx understood the reciprocal relationship of action and
circumstances is never made clear, but what he claimed to have
done was to reveal the long-term structural factors that render
certain historical developments inevitable in the long run. These
are, so to speak, the defining limits within which the actions
of men and women, whether as individuals or as groups, have
their scope.

2 3 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Capital

Marx's major work of
economic analysis, first
published in 1867. It
was originally intended
to be a three-part work,
but only the first part
was ever published
in full. It contains

Marx's analysis of the
development of capitalism
out of the feudal and
primitive economies
that had preceded it,
and his argument that
capitalism, as an inherently
exploitative system, would
inevitably implode, leading
to the establishment of a
socialist system.

IV

Marx’s critique of historians

What were the implications of Marx’s theories for the actual
writing of history? As we have seen, these theories lend themselves
to a simplified rigid schema, and this was the form in which they
were expounded by many of the first Marxists, whose primary
interest was in the political struggle and who were content with
an unequivocal determinism which pointed towards a proletarian
revolution in the near future. But Marx himself was emphatic that
his theory was a guide to study, not a substitute for it:

Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in
themselves no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate
the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of
its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema,
as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history.

On the contrary, our difficulties begin only when we set about
the observation and the arrangement - the real depiction - of our
historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the present. 27

What Marx rejected was not historical study as such but the
method employed by the leading historians of his day. Their error,
he maintained, lay in taking at face value what the historical
actors said about their motives and aspirations; in so doing,
Ranke and his imitators imprisoned themselves within the domi-
nant ideology of the age in question, which was merely a cloak
for the real material interests of the dominant class. ‘Objective’
history - that is, the dialectic of forces and relations of produc-
tion - was accessible through research into the economic structure
of past societies without reference to the subjective utterances
of historical personalities. At the same time, Marx never devel-
oped a clear methodology of history. His own historical writings
veered from the compelling political narrative of ‘The eighteenth
Brumaire’ (1852) to the abstract economic analysis of the first
volume of Capital (1867). And there remain ambiguities in his
conception of both the forces and the relations of production, as
well as the connection between base and superstructure. So his-
torians working within the Marxist tradition have had plenty of
interpretative work to do.

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

The impact of Marxism

During the generation after Marx’s death in 1883, historical
materialism began to have a pervasive though somewhat blurred
effect on the climate of intellectual opinion, as his major writ-
ings were translated into other European languages and socialist
parties of a Marxist persuasion sprang up. Marxism was certainly
one of the main currents contributing to the emergence of eco-
nomic history as a distinct field of enquiry. As J.H. Clapham - no
friend of socialism - conceded in 1929, ‘Marxism, by attraction
and repulsion, has perhaps done more to make men think about
economic history and inquire into it than any other teaching’. 28
But the content and method of the Marxist interpretation took
longer to make an impact. It first affected the practice of profes-
sional historians on a significant scale in the Soviet Union, where,
from the Bolshevik takeover until Stalin’s clampdown in 1931-2,
historical research and debate within a Marxist framework were
very lively. 29 The subjection of historical work to a strict party
line in Russia coincided with the emergence of Marxism as a pow-
erful intellectual stimulus in the West. This was prompted by the
obvious crisis in capitalism as a result of the Great Crash of 1929
and the apparent bankruptcy of liberal democracy in the face of
Fascism. But although important pioneer work in Marxist history
was done in Britain and elsewhere during the 1930s, it was mostly
achieved by active members of the Communist Party, who were
viewed with suspicion by most historians and received little aca-
demic preferment. Since the 1950s, however, Marxist approaches
to history have been much more widely influential - and with
historians who have no connection with the Communist Party
and in many cases are not politically active at all. Many of the
acknowledged leaders of the profession, such as Christopher Hill
and E.J. Hobsbawm, have written from a Marxist perspective.

Why is it that a historical interpretation that originated as a
revolutionary critique of contemporary society and which is open
to dogmatic abuse commands so much attention among scholars?
The reason can hardly be any longer the central role accorded
by Marxism to economic history, since the majority of economic
historians (particularly in Britain and the United States) are non-
Marxist. Nor can the appeal of Marxism be attributed to the
attractions of an ‘underdog’ view of history: although the Marxist
approach gives great weight to the role of the masses at certain

Great Crash of 1929

The disastrous fall in prices
on the New York Stock
Exchange on
24 October 1929, which
ended the prosperity of
the 1920s and ushered in
the worldwide economic
depression of the 1 930s.
Also known as the Wall
Street Crash.

234

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

historical conjunctures, it does not offer a worm’s-eye view of
history, nor is it concerned to celebrate the heroism of earlier
generations of proletarians. The real reason for Marxism’s strong
appeal is that it answers so well to the historian’s need for theory
- and in all three of the areas where theory is least dispensable.

The usefulness of Marxist social analysis

Through the base/superstructure model Marxism offers a particu-
larly useful way of conceiving the totality of social relations in
any given society. It is not just that the political, social, economic
and technological all have their place; in a full-scale Marxist
analysis these familiar distinctions lose their force. Social and
economic history become inseparable, and the study of politics
is saved from becoming the minute reconstruction of the antics
of professional politicians in their own arena, to which it can so
easily be restricted by the specialist. The appeal of ‘total history’
as practised by the Annales school also rests on its opposition to
compartmentalization, but Braudel and his followers have con-
spicuously failed to develop a satisfactory model for integrating
political history with the environmental and demographic studies
that provide the backbone of their work. In this respect at least, it
must be counted as inferior to Marxist history with its emphasis
on the reciprocal interaction between the productive forces, the
relations of production and the superstructure. It is no accident
that Hobsbawm, one of the finest writers of the broad historical
survey today, is a Marxist with a profound grasp of the master’s
own writings . 30

It is the same reciprocal interaction that saves Marxism from
the ahistorical error so common in other theories, of regarding
social equilibrium as the norm. Marxist historians hold as a
fundamental premise that all societies contain both stabilizing
elements and disruptive elements (or contradictions), and that
historical change occurs when the latter burst out of the existing
social framework and through a process of struggle achieve a new
order. Historians have found the notion of the dialectic to be an
invaluable tool in analysing social change of varying intensity,
from the barely perceptible movement within a stable social for-
mation to periods of revolutionary ferment.

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

2 3 5

Divisions within Marxism: culturalism v.
economism

Response to the strong pull exerted by Marxism’s theoretical range
does not, however, mean that historians practising in the Marxist
tradition are confined within an orthodoxy. What is striking about
the growth of Marxist historiography during the past forty years
or so, especially in Britain, is its diversity. As familiarity with
Marx’s writing has spread, so historians have responded to the
different and quite contradictory strands in his oeuvre, reflected in
a major divide in recent Marxist scholarship between what insiders
call ‘culturalism’ and ‘economism’. This divide is best illustrated
by reaction to the most widely read work of Marxist history ever
written in Britain - E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English
Working Class (see p. 73). The central theme of the book is how,
in reaction to proletarianization and political repression, the
English labouring classes developed a new consciousness so that
by 1830 they had achieved a collective identity as a working class
and the capacity for collective political action: that consciousness
was not the automatic by-product of the factory system but was
the outcome of reflection on experience in the light of a vigorous
native radical tradition. The book is thus ‘a study in an active
process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning’. 31
Thompson himself maintained that his book was true to Marx’s
recognition that men do, in some measure, ‘make their own
history’. His critics argued that Thompson underestimated the
force of the qualification added by Marx to that statement. They
pointed out that in omitting any detailed discussion of the transi-
tion from one mode of production to another, Thompson failed
to acknowledge the rootedness of class in economic relations
and therefore exaggerated the role of collective agency; because
Thompson was lax in his theory, he became trapped within the
subjective experience of his protagonists. 32 Thompson was unre-
pentant; he reaffirmed the need to hold theory and experience in
some kind of balance and to interpret Marxism as an evolving and
flexible tradition rather than a closed system. 33

The working class and Marxist theory

The Making of the English Working Class expresses another
marked tendency within British Marxist historiography, and
that is its interest in the history of popular movements, almost

236

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

handloom weavers

Those who wove cloth on
individual looms usually
operated within the
worker's home under the
old 'domestic' system of
textile production, which
preceded the introduction
of factory production.
Handloom weavers were
eventually forced out of
the market by competition
from factories, so they are
often used by historians as
an indication of the impact
of the new methods of
production in the early
nineteenth century.

regardless of their efficacy. One of the criticisms that can be made
of Marxism, as of other goal-oriented interpretations of history,
is that it distorts our understanding of the past by concentrating
unduly on those people and movements that were on the side of
‘progress’. But Thompson’s emphasis falls less on the new factory
workforce, which was the nucleus of the organized working class
of the future, than on the casualties of the Industrial Revolution
- people such as the handloom weavers, whose means of liveli-
hood was destroyed by the factory system. At the same time, it
would be a mistake to assume from this ‘underdog’ perspective
that Marxist history is merely ‘history from below’. Struggles
between classes are ultimately resolved at the political level, and
it is through control of the state that new dispositions of class
power are sustained. In fact it can be argued, though it is not
very fashionable to do so, that ‘history from above’ is just as
important a perspective for Marxist historians.

Finally, Thompson is a striking illustration of the tendency
among British Marxist historians to engage in constructive dia-
logue with historians of other persuasions. In Thompson’s case
the dialogue was pursued with vehement polemic, which some-
times belied the convergence between scholars from different
camps. Marxist history may have begun as a barely tolerated
subversion, but by the 1960s it was securely established in the
universities and its practitioners were fully integrated in the his-
torical profession - as is made abundantly clear by Hobsbawm’s
autobiography, Interesting Times (2002).

V

Marxism and the fall of communism

The extended treatment I have given to the Marxist theory of
history may seem to some readers like a self-indulgent surrender
to an outmoded radicalism. Has not Marxism now been placed
on the scrap-heap with the reduction of the world’s Marxist
governments to a tiny rump and the collapse of international com-
munism since 1989? Are not Marxist historians now trapped in
a time- warp? Like other scholars, historians would not be human
if they were unaffected by the political atmosphere in which they
work. The circumstances in which a Marxist scholar can work
today are far less propitious than they were forty years ago. For

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

237

that reason alone, there are many fewer historians who accept the
label. Most of the towering achievements of Marxist history were
made between the 1960s and 1980s - by Thompson, Hobsbawm
and Hill in Britain, as well as a galaxy of foreign scholars which
included Georges Lefebvre in France and Eugene Genovese in the
United States. Marxist history is unlikely to enjoy such a high
profile in the future.

But for as long as historians recognize the need for a theoret-
ical orientation which addresses both social structure and social
change, Marxism will be relevant. They may not be Marxists in
the sense of working within Marx’s system of thought, but they
will draw on the concepts and categories of the Marxist tradi-
tion. Medieval English history is a case in point. To argue that
the relation between lords and peasants was one of class conflict,
and that this tension was the main driver of social change in the
Middle Ages, is clearly a Marxist position. It was closely associ-
ated with Rodney Hilton, a prominent member of the Communist
Party Historians’ Group. Yet this interpretation remains very
much in contention, as a commemorative conference on Hilton’s
work established. As Chris Wickham remarks, ‘far from Marxist

After the fall of the Berlin
Wall in November 1989,
popular insurrection
overturned communist
governments across
Eastern Europe. Some held
that Marxism itself had
been discredited; graffiti
on this statue of Marx
and Engels in Dresden,
in East Germany, has
them declaring 'We are
not guilty', a view shared
by many who saw the
Soviet dictatorship as a
perversion of Marxism. Not
everyone agreed, however,
and many statues of Marx
and Engels, like those of
Lenin, were overturned
and smashed.

(Alamy/ICP)

238

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

ideas being dead or moribund, they are everywhere. But they have
been normalized’. 34 The same can be said of modern history. Peter
Clarke, a distinguished political historian who admits to being
a ‘wishy-washy Cambridge liberal’, concedes that ‘Marxism as
history [as distinct from prediction] can still be made to yield
insights for us’. 35 Marxist history has come into its own in the
highly stratified societies of the Third World. In South Africa, for
example, it was critical in showing how segregation and apartheid
- often dismissed as an irrational aberration - in fact served the
interests of capitalism by guaranteeing a supply of cheap labour
to the white economy. 36 Marxism can certainly not be written off
as a museum-piece.

Objection might also be made to the priority accorded to
Marxism in a chapter on historians and social theory. Marxism
was surely not the only theoretical game in town, and is not its
decline testimony to the superior attractions of other bodies of
theory? It is true that even in it heyday Marxism faced competi-
tion, particularly in the United States where liberal modernization
theory was much used as a means of accounting for the transi-
tion from traditional to modern industrial society with much less
revolutionary upheaval and more benign effects than are allowed
within Marxism. 37 More recently, feminists have developed theo-
ries of gender that explain social structure in comparatively novel
terms of sexual difference, the divide between public and private
spheres, and patriarchal power (see Chapter 10). On top of that,
when historians issue calls to embrace theory - as they increas-
ingly do - what they usually have in mind is not social theory,
but cultural theories which tackle questions of meaning and rep-
resentation (see Chapter 9). This most recent trend exposes one
of the principal weaknesses of Marxism, namely its tendency to
see culture as secondary: neither nationality nor religion receive
their due from Marxist historiography. During the 1990s theories
that treat culture as an autonomous dimension of society had
all the excitement of novelty, against which Marxism inevitably
seemed staid and dated. The conflict between social and cultural
approaches was played out in the journals (notably Social History
between 1992 and 1996), and Marxism was generally reckoned
to have lost out.

Yet, as this chapter has demonstrated, Marxist theory has had
a unique place in the explanatory resources of history. No other
theory offers such a comprehensive model of social structure,

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

239

or such a dynamic theory of social and political change. That
Marxism has been a living theoretical tradition for more than
150 years is only partly due to its origins as a political weapon. It
is also because historians and social theorists have recognized its
capacity for continuing development. There are already signs that
the cultural tide may be retreating. As it does, the merits of a theo-
retical approach that is rooted in the material realities of human
life, which recognizes the centrality of productive relations, and
which highlights the tension between collective agency and social
determination, will once more be recognized.

Social theory and the ‘big questions’ of history

As we have seen, academic opinion is divided about the merits
of theory. But all historians, unless they are diehard traditional-
ists, concede that theory has been very productive of stimulating
hypotheses. Its value, they claim, lies not in its explanatory power
but in its capacity to raise interesting questions and to alert
scholars to fresh source material - in a word, it has merit as a
heuristic device. Historical research usually demonstrates that
a given theory does not hold when confronted by the richness
of actual experience, but in the process a new area of historical
enquiry may be opened up. From this angle Marxist theory has a
very good track record as a source of ‘fertile error’: 38 whatever its
failings it has generated a great deal of historical knowledge about
the connections between political process and the socio-economic
structure. Equally it might be argued that the attempt to write
comparative history has proved its worth less in revealing common
patterns than in sharpening our awareness of the fundamental dif-
ferences between the periods or places under discussion.

This might be termed the minimalist justification of the use of
theory by historians. What it overlooks is that historical knowl-
edge consists of more than specific conjunctures and processes
in the past. Historians with their professional commitment to
primary research all too easily forget that there are large-scale
problems of historical interpretation which cry out for treatment:
how to explain long-term processes such as the growth of indus-
trialization or bureaucracy, and the recurrence of institutions such
as feudalism or plantation slavery in widely separated societies.
The broader the scope of the enquiry, the greater the need for
theory that does not simply alert the historian to fresh evidence,

heuristic

Learning from discovery
and experiment.

240

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

reductionism

The prior selection
of one level of reality
as fundamental, and
the interpretation of
everything else in terms
of that one level.

but which actually attempts to explain the process or pattern in
question. Marxist historiography, if it has done nothing else, has
at least brought some of the ‘big questions’ of history more insist-
ently to the centre of the scholarly arena, and has served to expose
to scrutiny the unconscious models that so often inform the work
of historians most vehement in their rejection of theory.

The conscious application of social theory by historians to
these broad questions has given rise to a great deal of reductionist
history by second-rate scholars anxious to prove their theoretical
credentials. But in the hands of the best historians - and it is
by their efforts that the enterprise should surely be judged - the
awareness of context and the command of the sources ensure a
proper relationship between theory and evidence. As Thompson
put it, historical understanding advances by means of ‘a delicate
equilibrium between the synthesising and the empiric modes, a
quarrel between the model and the actuality ’. 39 It is to be expected
that, submitted to this discipline, social theories should be tried
and found wanting, but that is no reason for renouncing their
use. The business of historians is to apply theory, to refine it, and
to develop new theory, always in the light of the evidence most
broadly conceived. And they do so not in pursuit of the ultimate
theory or ‘law’ which will ‘solve’ this or that problem of explana-
tion, but because without theory they cannot come to grips with
the really significant questions in history.

Theorists and the ‘English Civil War’

Marxist history has made a particularly important contribution
to the historiography of the English Civil Wars of 1642-9. In
his book The World Turned Upside Down, the British historian
Christopher Hill broke with orthodox analysis, which had
concentrated on the constitutional arguments between Parliament
and the Crown, to look at the explosion of radical political and
religious groups the period also witnessed, such as the Levellers
and Gerrard Winstanley’s Diggers. Hill was not merely putting
forward a version of ‘history from below’; he was presenting the
period as one in which constitutional and religious arguments
were essentially conduits for a more fundamental conflict between
classes. Other historians have responded to the relentlessly secular
terms of Marxist analysis by stressing the roots of the conflict in
actual religious belief, rather than viewing religion as a vehicle

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

241

for non-religious issues of class control. The growth of nationalist
movements in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland has led to a
separate reappraisal of the period in British terms, in which the
conflict between Crown and Parliament is seen as part of a much
broader interplay of religious and constitutional issues in Ireland
and Scotland, as well as England. Where the period used to be
referred to simply as ‘the English Civil War’, it is now common to
hear reference made, according to the standpoint of the speaker,
to ‘the English Revolution’ or ‘the British Civil Wars’.

E.P. Thompson and The Making of the
English Working Class

E.P. Thompson’s 1963 The Making of the English Working
Class won a wide popular readership for the way it brought
the experiences of ordinary people to the historical forefront.

It was the first systematic attempt to provide the working class
as a whole, as opposed to the trade unions or the co-operative
movement, with a heritage and a sense of collective identity.
Thompson’s book remains popular, particularly among those on
the political Left, though it is admired across the political divide
for the clarity of its style and for the humanity of its judgements.
Thompson himself went on to become a leading figure in the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels (1820-95) was the son of a prosperous
German cotton manufacturer. He acted as his father’s agent in
Manchester, then the centre of European cotton manufacture, and
was thus able to gain a detailed understanding of the workings
of the British economy and to observe at close hand the lives of
the working classes, which he described in his 1844 expose, The
Condition of the Working Classes in England. He met Marx the
same year, and the two men produced The Communist Manifesto
in 1848, laying out the basic theory of communism and calling
on working men of all lands to unite to free themselves from
oppression. After the failure of the European revolutions of
1848-9, Marx joined Engels in England and began the mammoth
task of research in the British Museum Reading Room, which was
to result in 1867 in his detailed critique of the capitalist system
Das Kapital (Capital). Marx took a leading role in the First
International, an international workers’ association which, he

242

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

hoped, would precipitate proletarian revolution and establish the
communist order, but he was unable to prevent it from splitting
into Marxist and anarchist factions. Marx died in poverty in 1883
and was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London, where his tomb
is still a place of pilgrimage for socialists and communists. Engels
devoted the rest of his life to translating and editing Marx’s works
in order to bring them to a wider readership.

‘The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808-73) was the third son of
Napoleon I’s brother Louis. He became head of the Bonaparte
dynasty in 1832 on the death of Napoleon I’s son, the Duke of
Reichstadt. Napoleon I had come to power by means of a military
coup staged on 9 November 1799, or 18th Brumaire Year X in
the revolutionary calendar then in use. Louis Napoleon sought
to emulate him in two abortive coup attempts in 1836 and 1840,
after the second of which he was imprisoned for life. He escaped
to England but returned to France after the Revolution of 1848
established a republic. He was elected to the new constituent
assembly as a representative of the Parisian working class, and
won the presidential elections of December 1848 with a huge
majority. However, he soon fell into conflict with the elected
assembly and resorted to ever more autocratic measures. On
2 December 1851 he sent troops to close the assembly, declared
the constitution dissolved and ordered widespread arrests. A year
later he declared a Second Empire with himself as the Emperor
Napoleon III (‘Napoleon II’ having been the Duke of Reichstadt).
Marx seized on this betrayal of working-class aspirations in his
sardonic essay ‘The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in
which he coined the famous aphorism that when history repeats
itself it does so ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’.
Napoleon Ill’s subsequent career bore out Marx’s cynicism: after
a string of diplomatic and military failures he was overthrown
after the disastrous war with Prussia of 1870-1 and ended his
days as a political refugee and asylum seeker in England.

Further reading

Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory, Routledge, 2002.

Peter Burke, History and Social Theory, Polity Press, 1995.

L.S. Feuer (ed.), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Basic Writings on
Politics and Philosophy, Fontana, 1969.

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

243

Matt Perry, Marxism and History, Palgrave, 2002.

Eric Hobsbawm, On History, Abacus, 1997.

E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, Merlin Press, 1978.

Elarvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians, Polity Press, 1984.

S.EE Rigby, Marxism and History: A Critical Introduction, Manchester
University Press, 1987.

Notes

1 See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The Mind and the Method of the
Historian, Harvester, 1981, ch. 1.

2 Some such theory evidently underlies much of G.R. Elton’s work, and
also the ‘high politics’ school of historiography, discussed above,

pp. 65-6.

3 A major exception is E.H. Carr, What is History? Penguin, 1961.

4 Peter Mathias, ‘Living with the neighbours: the role of economic
history’, 1970, reprinted in N.B. Harte (ed. ), The Study of Economic
History, Cass, 1971, p. 380.

5 For this view, see Jacques Barzun, Clio and the Doctors, Chicago
University Press, 1974.

6 Aileen S. Kraditor, ‘American radical historians on their heritage’,

Past and Present, LVI, 1972, p. 137.

7 Ibid., p. 137.

8 Paul K. Conkin, ‘Intellectual history’, in Charles F. Delzell (ed.), The
Future of History, Vanderbilt University Press, 1977, pp. 129-30.

9 David Thomson, The Aims of History, Thames & Hudson, 1969,
p. 105.

10 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Historical inevitability’, 1954, reprinted in Patrick
Gardiner (ed.), The Philosophy of History, Oxford University Press,
1974.

11 Comments in this vein recur in A.J.P. Taylor’s Bismarck, Hamish
Hamilton, 1955, and in his The Origins of the Second World War,
Penguin, 1964.

12 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History, Fontana, 1969, pp. 55-6.

13 G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials (Cambridge University Press, 1991),
pp. 13-15, 27; Arthur Marwick, ‘“A fetishism of documents?” The
salience of source-based history’, in Henry Kozicki (ed.), Developments
in Modern Historiography, Macmillan, 1993, pp. 110-11.

14 M.M. Postan, Fact and Relevance, Cambridge University Press, 1971,

p. 16.

2 44

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

15 E.E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Anthropology and history’, 1961, reprinted in
his Essays in Social Anthropology, Faber, 1962, p. 49.

16 Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology, Open Books, 1982, pp. 2-3.

17 For critical responses to Time on the Cross, see Paul David et al.,
Reckoning ivith Slavery, Oxford University Press, 1976.

18 See the criticism of Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘From historical sociology
to theoretical history’, British Journal of Sociology, XXVII, 1976,
pp. 295-305, and Tony Judt, ‘A clown in regal purple: social history
and the historians’, History Workshop Journal, VII, 1979, pp. 66-94.

19 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,
Lawrence & Wishart, 1971, pp. 20-1.

20 This interpretation is convincingly argued in Melvin Rader, Marx’s
Interpretation of History, Oxford University Press, 1979. For a
contrary view, see G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A
Defence, Oxford University Press, 1978.

21 Fernand Braudel, ‘History and the social sciences: la longue duree ’,
1958, reprinted in his On History, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980,
p. 51.

22 Engels to J. Bloch, 21 September 1980, reprinted in Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L.S.
Feuer, Fontana, 1969, pp. 436-7.

23 Karl Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, Lawrence &
Wishart, 1964, especially Introduction by E.J. Hobsbawm.

24 Marx to the editorial board of Otechestvennive Zapiski, November
1877, reprinted in Marx and Engels, Basic Writings, p. 478.

25 Marx, A Contribution, p. 21.

26 Marx, ‘The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, 1852, reprinted
in Marx and Engels, Basic Writings, p. 360.

27 Marx and Engels, ‘The German ideology’, 1846, in Basic Writings,
p. 289.

28 J.H. Clapham, ‘The study of economic history’, 1929, reprinted in
Harte, Study of Economic History, pp. 64-5.

29 John Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928-30, Macmillan, 1981.

30 See his Age of Revolution, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962, and his
Age of Capital, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976.

31 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin,
1968, p. 9.

32 See Richard Johnson, ‘Thompson, Genovese and socialist-humanist
history’, History Workshop Journal, VI, 1978, pp. 79-100, and Perry
Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism, Verso, 1980.

33 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, Merlin Press, 1978,
especially pp. 110-19.

HISTORY AND SOCIAL THEORY

245

34 Christopher Dyer et al. (eds), Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages,

Oxford University Press, 2007; Chris Wickham, ‘Memories of
underdevelopment: what has Marxism done for Medieval history, and
what can it still do?’, in C. Wickham (ed.), Marxist History-Writing
in the Twenty-first Century, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 35.

35 Peter Clarke, ‘The century of the hedgehog: the demise of political
ideologies in the twentieth century’, in Peter Martland (ed.), The
Tuture of the Past: Big Questions in History, Pimlico, 2002, p. 125.

36 Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (eds), Industrialisation and Social
Change in South Africa, Longman, 1982.

37 Wolfgang Knobl, “‘Theories that won’t pass away”: the never-ending
story of modernization theory’, in Gerard Delanty and Engin F. Isin
(eds), Handbook of Historical Sociology, Sage, 2003, pp. 96-107.

38 H.R. Trevor-Roper, ‘History: professional and lay’ (1957), reprinted
in H.L. Lloyd-Jones, V. Pearl and B. Worden (eds), History and
Imagination, Duckworth, 1981, p. 13.

39 Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, p. 78.

CHAPTER NINE

Cultural evidence and the
cultural turn

Whereas the social theories discussed in the previous chapter
focus on structure, change and agency, cultural theory attends
to meaning and representation. Its influence is evident today in
the very high profile enjoyed by cultural history. To some extent
cultural history draws on the well-established field of art history
(and also the history of film). But its approach to questions of
meaning is much more strongly influenced by literary theory and
by anthropology. The chapter ends with an assessment of the
present state of history in the light of what has come to be called
the cultural turn.

I n present-day historical scholarship no concept is more
frequently invoked than ‘culture’. It serves as an indicator not
just of the content of a given study but the theoretical orientation
taken by the author. What makes ‘culture’ so baffling to the novice
is that its meaning takes quite varied forms. Thus we speak not
only of visual culture, literary culture and material culture, but
also the culture of violence and a culture of fear - the implication
being that these very different areas are conceptually related in
some way. To speak of ‘cultural history’ or ‘the cultural turn’ reg-
isters a significant shift in the priorities of historians, but it takes
some persistence to fathom what kind of culture is being referred
to. Thirty years ago the great cultural critic Raymond Williams
remarked, ‘culture is one of the two or three most complicated
words in the English language ’. 1 That is no less true today.

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

247

Much of this complication arises from the fact that culture
has one set of meanings in common parlance, and another in aca-
demic discourse. Still the most familiar referent of culture is those
artistic and literary activities - sometimes referred to as ‘high’
culture - whose appreciation depends on education, taste, and the
necessary leisure to develop that taste; a ‘cultured’ person might
be expected to be widely read in ‘great’ literature, and regularly to
frequent art galleries and concert halls. Culture in this sense has
a long and absorbing history, going back to the earliest efforts
to represent human experience or observation before writing
had been invented. The academic study that has examined high
culture most closely is art history. Cultural historians share many
concerns with historians of art. While in theory covering all of
visual culture, the history of art is largely concerned with art as
a self-conscious elite experience, particularly with reference to
painting and sculpture. More recently the assumption that culture
is the preserve of an elite has been refuted in the name of popular
culture. This is the second dimension of culture. The ordinary
population may have been largely excluded from ‘high’ art, but
other cultural forms reflected or constructed their outlook on the
world - from the popular religious images of the Middle Ages,
through the chapbooks of the seventeenth century, to the mass
culture of the popular press and best-selling novels in the twen-
tieth century. Unlike elite culture, the history of popular culture
has not generated a separate academic discipline, and historians
are much more to the fore in researching it.

Both the history of art and the history of popular culture are
object-oriented: in each case the point of departure is a body of
artefacts or texts which manifestly had a cultural purpose. In
recent years, however, a much broader definition of culture has
become prevalent in academia. In the usage of historians, culture
has lost its association with specific cultural forms. It is under-
stood not as ‘high’ or ‘low’ culture, but as the web of meanings
that characterize a society and hold its members together. How,
in any given society in the past, did people apprehend their daily
experience? What were their attitudes to time and space, the
natural world, pain and death, family relationships and religious
observance? What were their common values? Peter Burke has
defined culture as ‘a system of shared meanings, attitudes and
values, and the symbolic forms (performances, artefacts) in which
they are expressed or embodied ’. 2 Note that meanings and values

248

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

come before the forms in which they were expressed. Cultural
history in this sense amounts to nothing less than the reconstruc-
tion of the mental, emotional and conceptual world of the past.

Finally, historians today talk much of ‘the cultural turn’. By this
they mean not just the arrival of a new sub-discipline but a reori-
entation in the priorities of historians. If culture is very broadly
defined - along the lines of Burke’s ‘system of shared meanings’ -
there is no limit to the scope of cultural history; it can be applied
to political conflicts, the divide between rich and poor, the position
of women, and so on. From this it is a short step to the insistence
that culture is the most important dimension of historical experi-
ence. In some versions of the cultural turn it is the only dimension
of the past that is deemed accessible to historical enquiry: culture
has become, in the words of one critic, ‘the bottom line, the real
historical reality’. 3 This point of view has negative implications
for other perspectives on the past. The challenge has been most
keenly felt in social history - the dominant branch of study in the
1970s and 1980s, but now sometimes condemned as wedded to an
outdated Marxism and a naive methodology. The tension between
social and cultural approaches has run through the historical pro-
fession for at least the past ten years. In this chapter I describe each
of the above branches of cultural history, as well as evaluating the
more imperial pretensions of the cultural turn.

I

Art history

All surviving material from the past is grist to the historian’s mill.
If that precept holds, it must apply to visual no less than textual
sources, in which case the historian should be as quick to draw
conclusions from paintings, sculpture and material objects as
from deeds and diaries. Yet that is not the impression one is likely
to get from perusing the work of historians. Most historians do
not make detailed analysis of the art of their chosen period; art
is seldom treated as evidence in a systematic way; and illustra-
tions in works of history are usually just that - included for their
decorative appeal rather than for close reading. To understand
why this is so we must take account of the practice of those
most expert in visual sources - the art historians. The first art
historians were connoisseurs: they prided themselves on their

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

249

skill in dating works of art, identifying the artist, and grouping
works of art into ‘styles’. Nowadays that is regarded as a narrow
and outmoded approach. But the tradition of connoisseurship
nevertheless underpins the claim that works of art are fundamen-
tally different from written sources, because understanding them
depends on very specific technical skills, and because they reflect
different conventions of representation. Their language is veiled
and multi-layered - in fact so elusive that only an exclusive exper-
tise can do justice to them.

Two strands in art history take approaches that are rather more
congenial to historians. First is an emphasis on the intellectual
and literary content of paintings. In the 1930s a highly influential
school of German art historians led by Erwin Panofsky developed
the idea of ‘iconography’: the reading of art in relation to the
intellectual world in which it was commissioned and created. This
worked particularly well in the case of artists like those of the
Italian Renaissance, who worked for highly accomplished patrons
and delivered works with philosophical or mythological themes. 4
More recently a group of socialist scholars has reacted sharply
against the tendency in traditional art history to abstract works of
art from the society that produced them. According to T.J. Clark,
the ideological nexus binding artists to the dominant structures of
society is crucial to understanding their work. Painting and sculp-
ture are not intrinsically different from any other kind of work:
they require certain conditions of production, and they feed off a
certain kind of audience or consumer. The task of the art historian
is to bring to light the links between a given work of art and the
social structures and historical processes in which it was created.
It follows that, as Clark puts it, ‘there can be no art history apart
from other kinds of history’. 5

Art history for historians

Where do historians fit into the world of art history? Some of the
purists’ case must be conceded. The extended research sometimes
required to elucidate a single painting is not likely to appeal to a
historian for whom the work in question is part of a much bigger
picture. Thus an intellectual historian of Neo-Platonist philos-
ophy in the Renaissance could hardly be unaware of its impact on
painters like Botticelli and Raphael who represented it in allegory;
but engaging directly in research on the iconography of particular

Erwin Panofsky
( 1892 - 1968 )

One of an extraordinary
generation of gifted
Jewish art historians who
began their careers in
Germany between the
wars, but were obliged to
flee the Nazis. Panofsky
left for America. Others,
notably Aby Warburg and
Ernst Gombrich, settled
in England, where they
transformed the profession
of art history.

Neo-Platonism

An intellectual movement
in Renaissance Italy that
sought to revive the
philosophy of Plato. It was
much favoured among the
ruling elites, especially in
Florence. Neo-Platonism
reflects the readiness of
Renaissance thinkers to
find inspiration outside the
Christian revelation.

allegory

A story of representation
to be understood
symbolically rather than
literally.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Old St Paul's Cathedral,
London, c.l 640, by
Wenceslaus Hollar.

Hollar was a gifted Czech
engraver who provided
an invaluable record
of London before the
Great Fire of 1666. This
image is the more striking
because the style of the
old cathedral is utterly
different from the one that
Christopher Wren designed
after the fire, and which
survives to this day.
(Bridgeman Art Library/
Guildhall Library, City of
London)

paintings could probably only be pursued at the cost of the overall
project. In such cases there is a demarcation of focus between the
historian and the art historian.

However that is only one kind of art, and one kind of interpre-
tative strategy. What about art as direct representation? The art of
the past depicts a vast range of everyday detail - clothing, imple-
ments, buildings - that are incidental to the artist’s purpose but
included in the interests of verisimilitude or ‘background’. Such
material should be seen as yet another instance of Marc Bloch’s
‘witnesses in spite of themselves’ (see above, p. 93). Among art
history theorists it is not uncommon to dismiss this kind of evi-
dence. According to Stephen Bann, the visual image proves nothing,
‘or whatever it does prove is too trivial to count as a component in
historical analysis’. 6 But historians like Peter Burke rightly ques-
tion this point of view. 7 Their argument is most convincing in the
case of images of a documentary kind. Thus the appearance of the
City of Tondon - including Old St Paul’s, its proudest monument

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

2 5 1

- before the Great Fire of 1666 is not a trivial matter, which is why
historians pay close attention to the highly detailed topographical
engravings made by Wenceslaus Hollar in the 1640s. Art provides
equally valuable evidence for the design of weapons, furniture and
table-ware. It is also worth bearing in mind that in recent years the
objects themselves - where they have survived - have become a
focus of study under the label ‘material culture’. 8

Another category of great interest to historians is art in the
service of the state or its opponents. Our understanding of the
Nazi regime has been enriched by the study of official propaganda
which combined crude slogans with highly effective images; satir-
ical attacks on the regime are no less useful for understanding the
play of political forces in Germany during the 1930s. In England
the political cartoon - highly critical and sometimes vitriolic - has
a history extending back to the eighteenth century, and some of
its leading exponents today acknowledge the influence of their
distinguished predecessors. These examples suggest that for the
historian ‘bad’ art is often more illuminating than great art - a
view not shared by art historians, for whom aesthetic response
counts much more.

Interpreting a medieval masterpiece

One further example illustrates the place of visual evidence in his-
torical reconstruction. The most famous work of art produced in
medieval England was probably the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the
Norman Conquest of England in 1066. The tapestry is 70 metres
long and comprises a succession of embroidered panels in narra-
tive sequence, not unlike a strip cartoon. It was probably made in
Canterbury between 1077 and 1082, by English craftsmen working
to a Norman agenda. Most people who view the Tapestry are
intrigued by the vividness with which artefacts are represented, par-
ticularly the weapons and armour used at the battle of Hastings.

However, the importance of the Bayeux Tapestry does not
lie only in its accumulation of evidential detail. It was also an
ambitious attempt to establish an official version of events, and
it was probably commissioned for this purpose by William the
Conqueror’s half-brother, who had fought at Hastings. The early
scenes, featuring William’s claim to be the rightful successor of
Edward the Confessor, were politically of the utmost importance.
The concluding depiction of William’s coronation in Westminster

2 5 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

The centerpiece of the
Bayeux Tapestry was the
battle of Hastings, during
which King Harold was
killed. Here that moment
is signalled by the Latin
text 'Rex Interfectus Est'.
The entire tapestry is
exhibited in the town of
Bayeux (Normandy).
(Getty Images/Hulton
Archive)

Abbey set the seal on the new king’s legitimacy. ‘One of the most
powerful pieces of visual propaganda ever produced’ is the verdict
of one authority . 9 Interpreting its propaganda content is crucial,
because the Tapestry ranks alongside two written chronicles as
one of the very small number of primary sources for the Norman
Conquest. Not surprisingly it has attracted intense scholarly effort
from art historians, archaeologists and historians.

There are plenty of reasons, then, why historians should not
hold the visual arts at arm’s length. It is true that they are the prov-
ince of a highly specialized academic discipline. Yet art historians
are often concerned to extract the last ounce of hidden meaning
from the works they study, rather than dwell on their more acces-
sible message. Historians are less inclined to see painting as the
product of a coterie or cabal; they are more interested in meanings
that were transparent to all, and which were repeated in different
works and different media. Above all, historians insist - along
with T.J. Clark - that art, like all other survivals of the past,
cannot be understood apart from its historical context, which
means placing it in its economic, social and cultural milieu. That
procedure has the effect of anchoring works of art in specific
time and place, rather than viewing them as symptomatic of the
‘spirit of the age’ ( Zeitgeist ), as nineteenth-century scholars tended
to do.

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

II

Popular culture: pre-literate and modern

At first glance the distinction between ‘high’ culture and popular
culture may seem invidious. It carries more than a hint of snobbish
elitism. It also loses sight of the capacity of culture to transcend
social divisions and speak to all people. This is particularly true of
Christian art. During the Renaissance and the Baroque, some of
the greatest paintings were displayed in churches, where they were
intended to intensify the spiritual experience of ordinary worship-
pers. However in both history and cultural studies ‘popular’ culture
holds a recognized place, and for good reasons. Fine art may some-
times have reached out to a popular audience, but very seldom has
that been its sole objective; such works were heavily imbued by the
aesthetic and symbolic concerns of the artist or the patron, or both.
Popular consumption, on the other hand, demands that the cultural
product be reasonably transparent, and that it be extensively dis-
seminated. That requirement became much easier to fulfil with the
invention of printing in the fifteenth century. Printing held out the
possibility, not just of spreading the printed word, but of reaching
illiterate people by means of images. This is a vital corrective to the
older notion that illiterate societies are ‘outside history’ in the sense
of being beyond the reach of historical reconstruction.

Reformation Germany provides a striking example. At one level
the conflict between the Catholic Church and the followers of Martin
Luther was played out within an elite composed of learned theolo-
gians and their powerful lay patrons. But grass-roots support was also
vital to the ambitions of the Reformers. As Luther himself said, images
were ‘for the sake of children and the simple folk who are more easily
moved to recall sacred history by pictures and images than through
mere words or doctrines’. R.W. Scribner has documented the huge out-
pouring of cheap prints that lionized the reformers and satirized the
Catholic Church in Germany. Most of them included text, but the real
meat was provided by images, which were often more complex than
the captions accompanying them. This was a new kind of propaganda
war, but Scribner points out that the association between religion and
visual imagery was not new: the laity was encouraged to understand
their faith in this way, and late medieval religion was intensely visual
in its devotional practices. Inevitably there are limitations to this kind
of analysis. We cannot tell whether the visual material brought to light

Baroque

The style that prevailed in
the visual arts in Europe in
the seventeenth century.

It was strongly associated
with the Catholic Church.

It tended to emphasize the
dramatic, the emotional
and richly ornate.

254

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

by Scribner reflected popular attitudes to religion, or whether it was
just a crude attempt to brainwash the multitude. Nor can we easily
tell whether the propaganda modified people’s beliefs and behaviour.
Yet for an early modern society where literacy was skin-deep the
inventory of Lutheran images is a precious resource. 10

In modern societies with mass literacy, popular culture requires
different emphases. The period between the Reformation and the
Industrial Revolution is reckoned to have witnessed a progres-
sive withdrawal of European elites from popular culture, making
the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ much sharper. 11 By 1900
most Western societies were controlled by modernizing elites.
Parliamentary institutions were part of this modernizing model,
with a progressively higher proportion of the population entitled to
vote. These were the circumstances in which literacy became nearly
universal by the beginning of the twentieth century. The historian
is presented with a mass of written evidence. Much of it bears on
one of the key issues in the study of popular culture: how much of
what the working class consumed was genuinely popular, and how
much was an attempt by the political elite to impose its values?
In late Victorian Britain the most widely read newspapers like the
Daily Mail were owned by individual proprietors with pronounced
political views, but circulation depended on addressing the concerns
of the readership. These issues lie at the heart of the controversy
about popular attitudes towards imperialism during the Scramble
for Africa and the years leading up to the First World War. The
Conservative Party - in power for most of the period from 1885 to
1905 - not only supported imperial expansion but believed that it
would make the party much more appealing to ordinary voters. The
Conservative press therefore promoted an aggressive flag-waving
triumphalism known to its critics as ‘jingoism’. At the same time
commercial advertisers often used colonial imagery to sell items
of domestic consumption (like Bovril and Pears Soap), suggesting
a popular identification with the Empire. But cultural forms over
which working-class people exercised more control tell a different
story. Music hall was at its zenith during this period. Away from the
more expensive venues in London’s West End, music hall manage-
ments needed to be sensitive to the prejudices of their lower-class
audience. Enthusiasm for the Empire was muted: there was support
for the British soldier, but relative indifference towards the causes
for which he was fighting. Another recurrent theme was the pain of
saying good-bye to loved ones emigrating overseas. The Empire was

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

2 5 5

In the South African
War

BOVRIL

gave Vigor to the

Fighter,
.Strength to the Wounded.

ami

.Sustenance to the Fnteric.

Hot ill formed an Important part of the
I'lwrinK) l>'atler.>, and »ai one of the
principal »upplk* of beth lta*c and I'kld
tfaipllal* throughout the Campaign.

The lotimcnUls to the strengthening and sustaining power of Bovril would till a book.
They have been icpeaiedly included in the Official Reports oi the Royal Army Medical
Corps. They have formed part of the thrilling accounts of the newspaper correspondents.
Tney have been embodied in the storks of eye-witnesses of scenes at the front and in live
ho*pital ten *. They have been part and parcel -f the interesting letters written by the
soldiers themselves to their relatives and friends at home. Doctors and nurses, officers and
privates, soldiers ani civilians, have pronounced the unanimous verdkt that as a stimulating,
nourishing, and sustaining food In the smallest compass, Bovril is without a peer.

Whether to the soldiers fighting at the front, or to the man at home battling
against the inclemencies of the weather, weakness, and disease.

IS LIQUID LIFE.

Bovril was invented
in the 1880 s as a
strengthening beef tea.

Its advertisements were
famous for linking the
product with imperialism.
Here British success in
the Anglo-Boer War is
attributed (in part) to
the soldiers' consumption
of the product.

(Getty Images/Hulton
Archive)

woven into the fabric of British society, but the assumption that it
was the object of wild popular enthusiasm needs to be treated with
some care. 12

Ill

Photography and film

For the twentieth century the study of popular culture is
transformed by a new medium - photography and film. The pho-
tographic camera had been invented in the 1840s, but initially it
was a rich person’s hobby, and its application was restricted by
technical limitations. Photography became more widely acces-
sible in the 1880s with the arrival of cheaper cameras and faster
shutter speeds. Photo journalism rapidly spread, while much of
the texture of daily life was recorded by a plethora of amateur

256

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

New Deal

The new directions
pursued in the
United States by the
administration of Franklin
D. Roosevelt who took
office in 1933 at the
height of the Depression.
The central plank of the
New Deal was direct
intervention by the state
to stimulate the economy
and create jobs.

photographers. By 1905 one in ten of the British population had
use of a camera.

How have historians made use of this resource? On any broad
definition, photography and film are ‘documents’: like other
primary sources, they provide evidence of the time in which they
were created. The difference is that they bring the past before our
eyes, apparently short-circuiting the laborious and often unreli-
able process of working from written sources. Newly discovered
film can make a big difference to our sense of ‘knowing’ the
past. In the most dramatic coup of its kind, more than 800 reels
of film were found in a disused basement in Blackburn in 1994.
Shot between 1901 and 1907 by the partnership of Mitchell and
Kenyon, they document the daily life of the town, specializing
in crowd scenes such as football matches, temperance parades,
and workers pouring through the factory gate. Most of the
subjects were caught off guard; but others waved and smiled at
the camera, knowing that later in the day they could pay to see
themselves on screen (since Mitchell and Kenyon were running a
thoroughly commercial operation). The films document the visual
arrival of the working class - as both subject and audience. 13

Documentary film became a recognized genre in the 1930s.
Its impact on audiences was well understood, with the result
that it was often loaded with a social or political message. In the
United States the New Deal administration commissioned leading
photographers to compile a visual record of ordinary people
during the Depression. The results were compelling, but they were
constrained by very specific guidelines. Smiling was discouraged;
people in their Sunday best were told to change into everyday
clothes; and only the ‘worthy’ poor were photographed. 14 Moving
film was subject to comparable pressures. Newsreels shown in
cinemas were perhaps the main sources of current affairs for
British audiences between the World Wars. Yet their potential to
critically inform viewers was inhibited by the belief that any hint
of political controversy would drive away the audience. The acute
social problems of the Depression were not allowed to undermine
the upbeat tone of the newsreels. Robert Rosenstone asks ‘What
does the documentary document?’ 15 The answer is that it docu-
ments the priorities of the film-maker as much as the slice of life
appearing on screen.

Feature film offers much more than a documentary record. It
is itself a cultural product, and a particularly powerful one. For

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

257

three decades - from the invention of ‘talkies’ until the rise of
television - feature films were the British public’s principal source
of entertainment; in 1946 one third of the entire population went
to the cinema at least once a week. 16 The cultural importance of
films was recognized at the time. Film-makers studiously avoided
content that could be criticized as too sexual or too political.
During the Second World War they were nudged in the direc-
tion of propaganda by the government. Much of the routine film
output could be described as ‘escapist’, yet the terms in which
the ‘good’ life (or the lost life) was characterized said much
about popular values. As Ross McKibbin points out, audience
taste in Britain showed a decided preference for American films,
particularly those that emphasized the differences of American
from British culture: these were summed up as ‘glamour’; but
admiration also extended to the competitive individualism that
dominated so many American films. 17 After 1945 the prominence
given to war films points to a national mood preoccupied by
memories of the ‘good war’ and by a yearning for an outmoded
British masculinity. 18

In 1927 the avant-garde photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
said, ‘the illiteracy of the future will be ignorance of photog-
raphy’. 19 The intervening years have seen the balance between the
textual and the visual drastically shifted in favour of the latter.
Yet historians have still not taken the full measure of Moholy-
Nagy’s statement. In the works of historians photographs are
more often encountered as illustrations, rather than treated as cul-
tural productions requiring critical analysis. Not many scholars
are fully informed about the techniques of film-making before the
age of digitization - especially those like montage and interpella-
tion, which come between the viewer and the supposed realism of
film. The most one can say is that photography and film are taken
more seriously than they used to be, both as uniquely revealing
sources and as significant features of popular culture.

IV

Writing cultural history

As suggested above, ‘culture’ and ‘cultural history’ have come
to mean something much broader and more ambitious than the
study of visual sources. They stand for the whole spectrum of

258

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

meaning in the life of society. Visual sources are not excluded,
but they take their place alongside all the other forms of human
behaviour that are endowed with meaning, which of course means
most of them. One example will clarify what is involved in the
shift to a cultural perspective. The history of the treatment of
mental disorders is a well-established theme in social history; but
only recently have historians tried to enter the mentality of the
insane and of those who labelled them so - in recognition that
the history of madness is, in Roy Porter’s words, ‘centrally about
confrontations between alien thought worlds ’. 20 There is all the
difference between writing about those mental confrontations and
describing the institutions to which the insane were committed: the
first is a cultural approach, the second is social history. Cultural
history is a vast and absorbing field, embracing everything from
formal belief through ritual and play to the unacknowledged logic
of gesture and appearance.

Baldly stated, there is nothing new about this kind of cultural
history. Curiosity about - and respect for - the cultural difference
of the past is in keeping with the spirit of historicism. Ranke and
his followers believed that technique and intuition would enable
them to reach across the gulf of time and listen to the past on its
own terms. But the emphasis today is rather different. For Ranke
the interpretation of meaning was a means to an end - the recrea-
tion of human action and the destiny of nations; the sources were
central because they yielded authenticated detail out of which
that story could be told. Present-day scholars increasingly study
meaning as an end in itself, in the belief that how people inter-
preted their world and represented their experience is a matter
of intrinsic interest. This means that they depart from Ranke’s
practice in another respect. Whereas he regarded textual meaning
as the property of the individual (whose background and attitudes
were accordingly central to the enquiry), it is the shared or collec-
tive meanings that historians value most today. For this purpose
instinct and empathy are manifestly inadequate. Uncovering
collective meanings calls for theoretical sophistication. Cultural
history is a contentious field, and one of the reasons is that it is
pursued through competing bodies of theory. Here I describe in
turn the three that have proved most illuminating: psychology,
literary theory, and anthropology.

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

259

The Annales school: a historical psychology?

The first historians who tried to investigate collective psychology
in the past were those of the Annales school. The founders of
Annales, especially Lucien Febvre, called for a history of mentali-
ties. In Febvre’s view the worst kind of historical anachronism is
psychological anachronism - the unthinking assumption that the
mental framework with which people interpreted their experience
in earlier periods was the same as our own. What, he asked, were
the psychological implications of the differences between night
and day and between winter and summer which were experienced
much more harshly by medieval men and women than they are
today? Febvre called for a ‘historical psychology’, developed
by historians and psychologists working together. 21 Instead of
looking at formally articulated principles and ideologies, the
history of mentalities is concerned with the emotional, the instinc-
tive and the implicit - areas of thought that have often found
no direct expression at all. Robert Mandrou has probably come
closest to fulfilling Febvre’s programme. In his Introduction to
Modern France, 1500-1640 (1961) he characterized the outlook
of ordinary French people as ‘the mentality of the hunted’: 22
helplessness in the face of a hostile environment and chronic
under-nutrition produced a morbid hypersensitivity, in which
people reacted to the least emotional shock by excessive displays
of grief, pity or cruelty.

Freud and ‘psychohistory’

Historical psychology raises large theoretical issues, given that
human psychology is such a heavily theorized area of study. Febvre
himself was not specially drawn to theory, but since his day one of
the key questions for historians in this area is how far they should
make use of the findings of psychoanalysis. Freud claimed that, as
a result of his clinical work with neurotic patients, he had arrived
at a theory that placed our understanding of the human mind on
an entirely new and more scientific footing. His theory turned on
the concept of the unconscious - that part of the mind imprinted
by the experience of traumas in infancy (weaning, toilet-training,
Oedipal conflict, etc.) which determines the emotional response of
the individual to the world in later life. For Freud and the many
followers who modified or extended his theory, the primary use

2 60

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Leonardo da Vinci
(1452-1519)

Italian artist and engineer.
His work was based
upon close observation
of the natural world; his
notebooks are full of
anatomical sketches as
well as designs for works
of engineering, although
some of the most
apparently far-seeing of
these, such as his design
for a helicopter, have
been shown to be later
forgeries.

James Mill (1773-1836)

British philosopher and
follower of the utilitarian
ideas of Jeremy Bentham,
which stressed the need
for modernizing social
and administrative reform
in order to ensure the
greatest happiness of
the greatest number.

His 1817 History of
British India criticized the
'backwardness' of native
Indian culture. He was the
father of John Stuart Mill.

John Stuart Mill
(1806-73)

British philosopher. His
1 859 work On Liberty
argued the case for
individual freedom
within the growing hold
of the state. Mill was a
committed believer in
female emancipation
and in widening the
parliamentary franchise
into the working class.

of psychoanalysis lay in the treatment of psychiatric disorders.
But Freud himself believed that his theory also offered a key to
the understanding of historical personalities, and in a famous
essay on Leonardo da Vinci (written in 1910) he in effect carried
out the first exercise in ‘psychohistory’. From the 1950s onwards
this approach to biography enjoyed a considerable following,
especially in the United States, where psychoanalysis was more
widely accepted than in any other country. At its best psychohis-
tory introduces a valuable element of psychological realism into
historical biography, as in Bruce Mazlish’s controversial study of
James Mill and John Stuart Mill - two lives in which the intellec-
tual is otherwise particularly likely to obliterate the emotional. 23
With the benefit of hindsight it is all too easy to bend the lives of
people in the past to a satisfying shape that emphasizes rationality
and steadiness of purpose. Psychohistory, by contrast, dwells on
the complexity and inconsistency of human behaviour; in Peter
Gay’s words, it depicts people as

buffeted by conflicts, ambivalent in their emotions, intent on reducing
tensions by defensive stratagems, and for the most part dimly, or
perhaps not at all, aware why they feel and act as they do . 24

In this way the inner drives can be restored to historical figures,
instead of confining their motives to the public sphere in which
their careers were played out.

The psychology of the collective

The insights of psychoanalysis are not confined to individual lives.
Indeed from the perspective of the cultural historian, the main
contribution of psychoanalysis has been to direct attention to cul-
tural patterns of parenting, nurture and identification, and to the
play of the unconscious in collective mentality. In The Protestant
Temperament (1977), one of the most wide-ranging applications
of a psychoanalytic perspective, Philip Greven has identified three
patterns of child-rearing in colonial America: the ‘evangelical’ or
authoritarian, the ‘moderate’ or authoritative, and the ‘genteel’
or affectionate. While these labels signal the directing influence
of theology and social position, the impact of each pattern is
traced through the characteristic psychic development of children
raised in these ways. Greven describes the ensuing personalities or
‘temperaments’ by reference to attitudes towards the self: hostility

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

261

in the case of the evangelicals, control in the case of the moder-
ates, and indulgence in the case of the genteel. Within a common
Freudian framework Greven’s approach makes allowance for the
cultural diversity of seventeenth and eighteenth-century America
without insisting that every American enacted one of the three
models. The appeal of psychoanalytic categories is particularly
strong in the case of those facets of the past that we consider
irrational or pathological but which made compelling sense to
those involved. Racism lends itself to this approach. Models of
repression and projection have been used to excellent effect to
explain white attitudes to other races during the heyday of colo-
nial expansion - as for example in Jacksonian America . 25

Objections to psychohistory

Of all the technical and methodological innovations made in the
past fifty years, psychohistory has attracted the most curiosity
outside the profession, but it is also open to quite serious objec-
tions, for two principal reasons. First, there is the problem of
evidence. Whereas the therapist seeks to recover the infantile
experience of the patient through the analysis of dreams, verbal
slips and other material produced by the subject, the historian
has only the documents, which are likely to contain very little, if
any, material of this kind and very few direct observations about
the subject’s early infancy. Much personal material that we might
consider highly relevant is completely unobtainable, yet this is the
bricks and mortar without which a psychohistorical theory of per-
sonality cannot be devised. Second, there is no reason to assume
that the propositions of psychoanalysis hold equally good for pre-
vious ages. Indeed, the assumption should rather be the reverse:
Freud’s picture of emotional development is very culture-bound,
rooted in the child-bearing practice and mental attitudes (espe-
cially towards sex) of late nineteenth-century middle-class urban
society. The application of Freud’s insights (or those of any other
contemporary school of psychoanalysis) to individuals living in
any other period or society is anachronistic. For the structure of
human personality over time is precisely what needs to be inves-
tigated, instead of being reduced to a formula. Even the notion
of the self, which we (like Freud) may regard as a fundamental
human attribute, was probably quite foreign to Western culture
before the seventeenth or eighteenth century. As one particularly

Jacksonian America

The period 1828-37,
covering the presidency
of Andrew Jackson
(1767-1845). Jackson, a
successful general from
North Carolina, adopted
a robust approach to
politics. He was a firm
believer in keeping the
powers of the federal
authorities to a minimum;
paradoxically, he enforced
his view by using his
presidential right of
veto far more than his
predecessors had done.

He engaged in a long and
generally popular battle
against the Bank of the
United States, believing
it to be an example of
centralized tyranny.

262

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

parochialism

Narrow-minded concern
with one's own immediate
locality and concerns
without regard to their
wider context. 'Parochial'
means literally 'referring to
a parish'.

trenchant critic has put it, psychohistory can easily become a
determinist form of ‘cultural parochialism’. 26 Historians who
draw on psychoanalytic theory have to be particularly careful to
temper their interpretations with a respect for historical context.

Literary theory

V

The second body of theory that bears on cultural history is drawn
from literary studies. This is the critical stance towards texts vari-
ously known as deconstruction or discourse theory. We saw in
Chapter 7 how literary theorists, drawing on Saussure’s theory
of the materiality and arbitrariness of language, have rejected the
notion of the authentic authorial voice, and instead view the text
as open to a multiplicity of ‘readings’ in which different audiences
find different meanings. In Chapter 7 I dwelt on the exceedingly
troubling implications that the indeterminacy of texts holds for
the epistemological status of history. But it is important to rec-
ognize that, at a practical level, the new theories of the text open
up the prospect of significant advances in the cultural reconstruc-
tion of the past. Traditionally historians regarded their primary
sources as a point of access to events or states of mind - to what
had an ‘objective’ or demonstrable existence beyond the text.
Literary theory teaches historians to focus on the text itself, since
its value lies less in any reflection of reality than in revealing the
categories through which reality was perceived. From this per-
spective, primary sources are essentially cultural evidence - of
rhetorical strategies, codes of representation, social metaphors
and so on. Literary theory gives historians the confidence to
move beyond the letter of the text (the traditional focus of their
scholarship) and listen to a wider range of voices that goes well
beyond the scope of the injunction to treat the sources as ‘wit-
nesses in spite of themselves’. Close reading - or reading ‘against
the grain’ - is even more time-consuming than the time-honoured
procedures of historical method, and for this reason it tends to
be applied to smaller bodies of source material of considerable
textual richness.

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

263

Linguistic discourse and the language of politics

These ideas have had a marked impact on the history of political
thought. For if language facilitates certain modes of thought
while excluding others, and if there is a sense in which language
determines consciousness (rather than the other way round, as
common sense declares), then the political order must depend on
linguistic as much as administrative structures: politics is consti-
tuted within a field of discourse, as well as within a particular
territory or society. In modern polities there is usually a number
of alternative and interlocking discourses jostling for ascendancy
- expressing, for example, reverence for the state, class solidarity
or ethnic exclusivity. A well-documented example is the English
Revolution. Kevin Sharpe has argued that prior to 1642 Crown
and Parliament still shared many political values, and their disputes
were framed by a common respect for the law and for precedent.
What was truly revolutionary about the Civil War was that those
who rebelled against the king were led to act in ways which their
language could not as yet represent. By the end of the seventeenth
century, as a result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9, the
relationship between king and people had been redefined in terms
of rights and contract. According to this interpretation the shift
in discourse was no less significant than the institutional and
economic changes of the period. 27 A comparable case has been
made for the French Revolution. Legitimized under the banner of
liberte, egalite, fraternite, the Revolution was among other things
‘the invention of a new form of discourse constituting new modes
of political and social action’. 28 Language, then, is power. In
taking on board this central perception of discourse theory, histo-
rians are redefining their understanding of political thought. They
are demonstrating how the members of a polity experience, reflect
and act politically within the conceptual boundaries of particular
discourses, and how these discourses are themselves subject to
contestation, adaptation and sometimes total rupture.

Discourse analysis also has much to contribute to the historical
understanding of nationality - a category traditionally used by histo-
rians almost without reflection. It was pointed out in Chapter 1 how
national identity is never ‘given’, but arises from specific historical
circumstances which change over time. If nations are forever being
constructed anew or ‘invented’, much will depend on the elabora-
tion of cultural symbols and on highly selective renderings of the

liberte, egalite,
fraternite

'Liberty, equality,
fraternity', the slogan
often inscribed on
buildings, documents and
other forms of officialdom
during the French
Revolution. It attempted
to sum up the essential
spirit of the Declaration of
the Rights of Man.

polity

A state or other entity
run by some form of civil
government.

2 64

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Reformation

In England, the process
of religious change in the
early sixteenth century
in which the English
Church first renounced
the authority of the
papacy in favour of that
of the monarch and then
established a form of
Protestantism known as
Anglicanism.

letters of remission

Official letters requesting
a royal pardon or a
reduction in the sentence
imposed by a court.

notaries

Legal clerks with the
authority to draw up legal
documents.

national past. The dissemination of this material to a mass audience
is fundamental to nationalism in the modern world. For this reason
in Imagined Communities (1983) - one of the most influential
analyses of nationalism - Benedict Anderson places great weight
on ‘print capitalism’ as a prerequisite for the growth of nationalism
since the sixteenth century. More detailed work on the languages
of patriotism shows how the content of particular nationalisms has
changed over time. In England since the Reformation it has had a
shifting relation to the monarchy, popular liberties and foreigners -
to name just three indicators of political hue. Because ‘the nation’
is more imaginary than real, the metaphors in which it is expressed
have great potency, and their popular meaning - be it democratic or
authoritarian - becomes a battleground between rival conceptions of
the political order. 29

The language-led approach to texts is also evident in the atten-
tion that some historians are now giving to the literary form - or
genre - in which their sources are written. Here the argument is
that our interpretation of the ostensible content of a text may
need to be considerably modified in the light of the genre to
which it belonged - and which conditioned the understanding
of its readers. When Natalie Zemon Davis studied the letters of
remission submitted to the French courts in the sixteenth century
by supplicants seeking a royal pardon, she soon realized that
they could not be regarded simply as direct personal statements.
They were drawn up by notaries in an avowedly literary way
which reflected several contemporary genres, including fictional
ones, each with its own conventions. ‘I am after evidence of how
sixteenth-century people told stories’, she writes,

. . . what they thought a good story was, how they accounted

for motive, and how through narrative they made sense of the

unexpected and built coherence into immediate experience . 30

Davis calls her book Fiction in the Archives, not because she
regards the letters of remission as fabrications, but to draw atten-
tion to the essentially literary issues that they pose. The question
of whether the supplicants were guilty is here subordinated to
questions of meaning and representation.

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

265

VI

Anthropology

But for recent historians the most fertile source of ideas in the
area of collective mentality has been not textual theory but cul-
tural anthropology. Although the relevance to history of the study
of small-scale societies of the present day may not be readily
apparent, there are several reasons why historians should be alert
to the findings of anthropology. These reasons are most obvious
in the case of those historians who are themselves specializing in
some area of Third World history, but they apply also to their col-
leagues in more conventional fields. The findings of anthropology
suggest something of the range of mentalities to be found among
people who are acutely vulnerable to the vagaries of climate and
disease, who lack ‘scientific’ control of their environment, and
who are tied to their own localities - conditions that obtained in
the West during most of the medieval and early modern periods.
Certain long-lost features of our own society such as the blood
feud or witchcraft accusations still persist in some parts of the
world today; direct observation of the modern variant prompts a
sounder grasp of the relevant questions to be asked about compa-
rable features in our own past for which the direct evidence may
be very sparse or uneven. The classic demonstration of this is
Keith Thomas’s Religion and. the Decline of Magic (1971) which
drew on the studies of Evans-Pritchard and other ethnographers
to define a new agenda for the study of witchcraft in early modern
England. For historians encountering a past society through the
medium of documentary sources there is - or ought to be - the
same sense of ‘culture shock’ that the modern field-worker experi-
ences in a remote and ‘exotic’ community.

blood feud

A bitter conflict, often
involving the families and
friends of the protagonists
and stretching over more
than one generation.

The anthropology of mentality

Since Thomas’s path-breaking work the relevance of anthro-
pology to the cultural historian has broadened to become one
of method and theory, not just a source of suggestive analogies.
The key issue is how anthropologists get to grips with the world-
view of their subjects. Because they conduct their research by
combining the roles of participant and observer, anthropologists
can hardly fail to register the vastly different mental assump-
tions that operate in pre-literate, technologically simple societies.

2 66

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

lying-in

Childbirth.

Indeed ‘mentality’ is at the heart of their specialist expertise, and
the concept of ‘culture’ now most in vogue with historians is
essentially an anthropological one. In fieldwork anthropologists
pay special attention to symbolic behaviour - such as a naming
ceremony or a rain-making ritual - partly because the sense of
strangeness is then most challenging, and partly because symbol
and ritual are seldom one-dimensional but express a complex
range of cultural values; the seemingly bizarre and irrational tend
to reflect a coherence of thought and behaviour which in the last
resort is what holds society together. The influential American
anthropologist Clifford Geertz referred to his own cultural read-
ings of very densely textured, concrete facts as ‘thick description’:
one episode - in the best-known case a Balinese cock-fight - may
provide a window on an entire culture, provided we do not
impose on it a coherence that makes sense in our terms. 31 There
is an interesting convergence with literary theory here: just as a
text is open to many readings, so a ritual or symbol may yield
a range of meanings. Geertz himself regarded culture as being
like an assemblage of texts, and he explains the goal of cultural
anthropology in terms of ‘the text analogy’. 32

Since descriptions of ritual provide some of our best evidence
for pre-literate societies of the past, it is not surprising that his-
torians have welcomed the insights of cultural anthropology.
Natalie Zemon Davis is one of many historians who acknowl-
edge the influence of Geertz. She invokes the ‘text analogy’ in
describing her work on sixteenth-century French society:

A journeyman’s initiation rite, a village festive organization, an
informal gathering of women for a lying-in or of men and women for
story-telling, or a street disturbance could be ‘read’ as fruitfully as a
diary, a political tract, a sermon, or a body of laws . 33

The mass in late medieval England, the carnival in early modern
France and the rituals of monarchy are just some of the sym-
bolic material that has attracted enquiry along these lines. In a
bravura demonstration of the technique of ‘thick description’,
Robert Darnton has analysed the trivial episode of a cat-killing
by apprentice printers in Paris during the 1730s. By placing the
reminiscences of one of the printers in the context of a varied
range of contemporary cultural evidence, Darnton shows how
the massacre of cats combined veiled elements of a witch-hunt, a
workers’ revolt and a rape - which is why the apprentices found

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

267

it such a hugely amusing way of letting off steam. ‘To get the joke
in the case of something as unfunny as a ritual slaughter of cats is
a first step towards “getting” the culture .’ 34 In this kind of history,
carefully observed detail really counts, often several times over.

The limitations of anthropology

Darnton’s cat massacre demonstrates the excitement of this
approach - but also its dangers. Whereas the anthropologist,
as a participant-observer, is in a position to observe the ritual
and generate additional contextual evidence, the historian has
to accept the limits of the sources. The cat-killing is described in
only one account, and a retrospective one at that. Darnton treats
the cat-killing as a workers’ revolt which prefigured the French
Revolution. But, as Raphael Samuel points out, the story could
just as well have served an analysis of adolescent culture or a study
of social attitudes towards animals; a single source lends itself all
too readily to ‘symbolic overloading ’. 35 Cultural historians are
for the most part thrown back on oblique and ambiguous evi-
dence of what went on in the minds of ordinary people, and it is
appropriate to recognize these limitations before wholeheartedly
embracing the interpretative procedures of cultural anthropology
or textual theory. In fact the value of the anthropological approach
lies as much in its general orientation as in its handling of detail.
It serves as a strong reminder that history is not just about trends
and structures that can be observed from the outside, but also
demands an informed respect for the culture of people in the past
and a readiness to see the world through their eyes.

VII

The impact of the cultural turn

Twenty years ago most social history, and much political history
also, was confidently written in terms of coherent collectivities
such as class and nation. It made sense to write about ‘the working
class’ or ‘the French nation’ because these groups were grounded
in a shared existence from which they derived a common, defining
consciousness, extending beyond the life-span of the individuals
who happened to constitute the group at any one time. This was
most explicit in the case of the Marxists’ handling of class and

2 68

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

class consciousness, but liberal scholarship was little different
in its treatment of political parties, religious denominations and
nations as historical actors spanning the generations. In both
liberal and Marxist writing these social identities acquired an
almost material reality, which served to drive forward ‘grand
narratives’ of progress or revolutionary destiny. By the 1970s this
social, material and progressive paradigm may not have taken
over the mainstream, but it undoubtedly represented the cutting
edge and was the focus of the most important historiographical
debates.

That social paradigm has come under attack from two direc-
tions. First in the field were the Annales historians with their
emphasis on collective mentalities. They had, from the beginning,
asserted that no picture of the past could be complete without
a reconstruction of its mental landscape. Braudel incorporated
mentalities into his structural scheme by including them alongside
geographical factors in his longue duree. By the 1980s the leading
Annalistes were claiming more than this, declaring that mentality
was the fundamental level of historical experience, and culture its
principal expression. As Georges Duby has put it:

Men’s [sic] behaviour is shaped not so much by their real condition

as by their usually untruthful image of that condition, by behavioural

models which are cultural productions bearing only a partial

resemblance to material realities . 36

By the 1990s the main impetus for the attack on the social para-
digm came from textual theory, with its assault on referential
notions of representation. It proved to be a short step from
rejecting authentic meaning in texts to fracturing accepted social
identities, since what does identity depend on if not a shared lan-
guage and shared symbols? Class, race and nation all lost their
‘hard’ objective character and became no more than unstable
discourses. Social historians had appealed to ‘experience’, but
the foundational status of experience was now questioned on the
grounds that it had no existence prior to language. 37 Culture itself
was seen as a construction, rather than a reflection of reality.
The Postmodernist attack on ‘grand narratives’ completed the
job of demolition, by discrediting the persistence of active social
identities over time. What is left is the study of representation -
of how meanings are constructed, not what people in the past
did. Cultural history is the principal beneficiary of this shift in

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

269

historical thinking because the priority it gives to language makes
questions of meaning and representation more important than
anything else. The consequences can be unsettling. For example,
the dominant theme of Italian history in the nineteenth century
is usually taken to be the Risorgimento - the movement to unite
Italy under Italian rule (finally achieved in 1870). It has long been
studied as a series of political and military initiatives, dominated
by the charismatic figure of Garibaldi and his mobilization of
popular support in many parts of Italy. The Risorgimento is no
less studied today, but in recent books the focus has shifted away
from the political and military drama. Italian national feeling is
now viewed as an essentially cultural phenomenon (as in opera
and novels), and Garibaldi is reproached as the maker of his
own legend - an ‘invented hero’ rather than the great general of
popular renown. Italian unity becomes a chimera. 38

The benefits and limitations of the cultural agenda

If taken to extremes, it is clear that the cultural turn would
undermine much of the traditional agenda of historians. The
issue is starkly posed when representation is proposed as the only
legitimate field of historical study. An article by Patrick Joyce
advocating just this is provocatively titled ‘The end of social
history?’ 39 By this he means that the history of class and class rela-
tions in the mould of E.P. Thompson no longer has validity; in his
own writing Joyce has, for example, analysed the subject of indus-
trial work in cultural rather than economic terms, thus detaching
it from labour history. 40 For all its rhetorical skill, Joyce’s position
has found little favour with historians. It amounts to an accept-
ance of the Postmodernist charge-sheet against history as usually
practised. Most of the profession is little inclined to see the scope
of their work pared down to the indeterminate dimensions of
discourse, and this goes for the majority of cultural historians
too. Taking representation seriously does not necessarily mean
disparaging everything else. Nor does a cultural agenda signal a
minimalist position on the issue of historical truth. Most histo-
rians working in the field acknowledge the positive ways in which
textual theory has enriched the subject, without taking on board
its destructive epistemology.

Yet the difference of emphasis remains. The historian of class
conflict is doing something different from one who analyses

270

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

industrial relations as a ritual bound by the conventions of a
game; writing a traditional political history produces different
results from a focus on the cultural instability of national identity;
and so on. This difference is crucially one of theory. For the first
group of historians, the subject of their research usually holds
interest because of its place in a social narrative, which in turn
is interpreted by reference to a dynamic theory of social change,
often Marxist. The second group, on the other hand, is essentially
interested in contextualizing - in making cultural connections
within a single plane, as it were, often with scant attention to
changes over time. Theories of the mind, of the text and of culture
itself provide the conceptual underpinning for this work, and they
too serve to enrich contextual understandings rather than illumi-
nate historical process. Once again, as in Chapter 1, we see the
tension in historical writing between the explanatory mode and
the re-creative mode. Social theory continues the agenda set in
the Enlightenment of interpreting the direction of human history;
events and processes are deemed significant in terms of the place
they hold in a more extended narrative. Cultural theory takes up
the historicists’ emphasis on the inherent strangeness of the past,
and the need for intellectual effort to interpret its meaning. This
chapter and Chapter 8 have described two quite different kinds of
history, and the conflict between them is very much of our time.
But the tension they reflect is as old as the discipline itself.

Freud and psychoanalysis

The Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) developed
the process of psychoanalysis, whereby patients were first relaxed
and then encouraged to speak freely about their feelings and
memories, often going far back to childhood. His 1900 work
The Interpretation of Dreams argued that dreams bring out
mental pain and trauma that is otherwise repressed in the mind.
There was fierce controversy over his tracing of the development
of sexual feelings and desires to early childhood, including the
Oedipus complex, named after the figure in Greek mythology
who unknowingly kills his father and marries his own mother, by
which a young boy experiences a powerful desire to possess his
mother and a fear that his father might retaliate by castrating him.

Freud held that the mind is divided into three parts: the
id, which represents inherited, innate instinct; the ego, which

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

271

represents the individual’s sense of his or her own self within
the world; and the super-ego, which reflects those wider social
values and ideals that have been learned from parents or through
schooling or experience. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung
identified different types of personality, notably the introvert
and the extrovert, and formulated the theory of the ‘collective
subconscious’, those hidden attitudes and fears that are shared by
the members of a particular cultural grouping.

Freud’s theories proved a major inspiration to artists and
writers and were particularly popular in the United States,
whereby the late twentieth century psychoanalysis had become
a virtual industry. Although the basis for Freud’s theories has
come under increasing attack in recent years, public interest in
psychology and the working of the mind remains as strong as ever.

Further reading

Simon Gunn, History and Cultural Theory, Longman, 2006.

Sarah Barber & Corinna M. Peniston-Bird (eds), History Beyond
the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources,
Routledge, 2009.

Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing, Reaktion, 2001.

Marnie Hughes- Warrington, History Goes to the Movies: Studying
History on Film, Routledge, 2007.

Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture, Routledge, 2009.

Peter Gay, Freud for Historians, Oxford University Press, 1985.

T.G. Ashplant, ‘Psychoanalysis in historical writing’, History Workshop
Journal, XXVI, 1988.

Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History ?, 2nd edn, Polity Press, 2008.

Miri Rubin, ‘What is cultural history now?’, in David Cannadine (ed.),
What is History Now?, Palgrave, 2002.

Lynn Hunt (ed.), The New Cultural History, California University
Press, 1989.

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in
French Cultural History, Allen Lane, 1984.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Notes

1 Raymond Williams, Keywords, Fontana 1983, p. 87.

2 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Temple Smith,
1978, p. 270.

3 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Culture, cultural studies and the historians’, in
Lawrence Grossberg et al. (eds), Cultural Studies, Routledge, 1992,
p. 617.

4 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, Harper & Row, 1962, ch. 6.

5 T.J. Clark, The Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1 848
Revolution, Thames & Hudson, 1973.

6 Stephen Bann, Under the Sign, University of Michigan Press, 1994,

p. 122.

7 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing, Reaktion, 2001.

8 Karen Harvey (ed.), History and Material Culture, Routledge, 2009.

9 Suzanne Lewis, The Rhetoric of Power in the Bayeux Tapestry,
Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. xiii.

10 R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk, 2nd edn, Oxford
University Press, 1995. The quotation from Luther is on p. 244.

11 Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe.

12 John MacKenzie (ed.), Propaganda and Empire, Manchester
University Press, 1986; Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded
Imperialists, Oxford University Press, 2004.

13 Vanessa Toulmin et al. (eds), The Lost World of Mitchell and
Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, BFI, 2004.

14 Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock, Minnesota
University Press, 1991 pp. 177-9.

15 Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film/Film on History, Longman,
2006, p. 70.

16 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures in England, 1918-51, Oxford
University Press, 1998, p. 419.

17 Ibid., pp. 431-5.

18 John Ramsden, The Dam Busters, I.B. Tauris, 2002.

19 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, quoted in Derak Sayer, ‘The photograph:
the still image’, in Sarah Barber and Corinna M. Peniston-Bird
(eds), History Beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching
Alternative Sources, Routledge, 2009, p. 49.

20 Roy Porter, Mind Forg’d Manacles: A History of Madness in England
from the Restoration to the Regency, Athlone, 1987, p. x.

21 Lucien Lebvre, ‘History and psychology’, 1938, reprinted in Peter
Burke (ed.), A New Kind of History, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

CULTURAL EVIDENCE AND THE CULTURAL TURN

273

22 Robert Mandrou, Introduction to Modern France, 1500-1640: An
Essay in Historical Psychology, Arnold, 1975 (French edition 1961),

p. 26.

23 Bruce Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the
Nineteenth Century, Hutchinson, 1975.

24 Peter Gay, Freud for Historians, Oxford University Press, 1985,
p. 75.

25 Michael P. Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the
Subjection of the American Indian, Knopf, 1975.

26 David E. Stannard, Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of
Psychohistory, Oxford University Press, 1980, p. 30.

27 Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England, Frances
Pinter, 1989, ch. 1.

28 Keith Baker, ‘On the problem of the ideological origins of the
French Revolution’, in Dominick La Capra and Steven L. Kaplan
(eds), Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New
Perspectives, Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 204.

29 Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of the
British National Identity, 3 vols, Routledge, 1989.

30 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives, Polity Press, 1987,
p. 4.

31 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Hutchinson, 1975,
ch. 1.

32 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive
Anthropology, Fontana, 1983.

33 Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France,
Duckworth, 1975, pp. xvi-xvii.

34 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in
French Cultural History, Allen Lane, 1984, p. 262.

35 Raphael Samuel, ‘Reading the signs: II’, History Workshop Journal,

XXX, 1992, pp. 235-8, 243.

36 Georges Duby, ‘Ideologies in social history’, in Jacques Le Goff
and Pierre Nora (eds), Constructing the Past: Essays in Historical
Methodology, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 151.

37 Joan Scott, ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Inquiry, XVII, 1991,
pp. 773-97.

38 See for example Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, Yale
University Press, 2007.

39 Patrick Joyce, ‘The end of social history?’, Social History, XX, 1995,
pp. 73-91.

40 Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meaning of Work, Cambridge
University Press, 1987.

CHAPTER TEN

Gender history and
postcolonial history

This chapter examines some of the most dramatic extensions of
history’s subject matter. Fifty years ago women were ignored,
and Third World countries were treated from a narrowly Western
perspective. Today, women’s and gender history is regarded as
central to the understanding of the past. Meanwhile postcolonial
historians are not only developing histories of Africa and Asia
‘from below’, but are insisting that the history of the former
colonial powers be reassessed from the perspective of the
colonized.

P lacing gender history and postcolonial history in the same
chapter may seem an odd procedure - even a demeaning one
if it suggests that women and Third World societies can be lumped
together as marginal add-ons. My treatment of them should dispel
any such impression. The reason for considering them together
is that they raise comparable opportunities and problems for
historians. Both aspire to give a voice to huge constituencies that
previously had no place in the historical record; and in doing so,
both have thrown up challenges to what historians do, critiquing
their methods and even the validity of their practice. Women’s
history and postcolonial history not only represent an incremental
enlargement of the range of historical study; they have the poten-
tial to modify the character of the discipline as a whole.

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

275

I

Women’s history

That outcome seemed highly unlikely when women’s history was
first formulated during the 1970s. As described in Chapter 1,
women’s history emerged as a feature of Women’s Liberation. It
was part of a broad feminist strategy to contest the masculinist
assumptions of academic knowledge. The pioneers of women’s
history were not only curious about the lives of women in the past;
they understood that reclaiming those lives was essential to a fully
formed women’s consciousness in the present. Part of the required
political energy was generated by studies of women’s daily lives
that highlighted their subordination to men. History provided
some of the most compelling evidence for the centuries-long
existence of patriarchy, and awareness of the extent of patriarchy
was central to consciousness-raising. The other source of political
energy was the lives of those women who had taken action to
resist the political and social oppression of their day. Explicitly
feminist organizations, like the suffragists and suffragettes of
Edwardian Britain, were an obvious focus. More surprising was

In the late 1960s and
early 1970s the Women's
Liberation movement led
to the development of
a feminist approach to
history, which sought to
bring out the contribution
of women and the many
ways in which they were
held down by the male-
dominated societies of
the past.

(Corbis/Bettmann)

276

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Owenism

Robert Owen (1771-18583
was a Welsh industrialist
whose experiments in
running his spinning mill
at New Lanark in Scotland
along humanitarian and
co-operative lines led
him to found the Grand
National Consolidated
Trades' Union to represent
the entire skilled working
class. The union was
killed off in 1834 when a
group of farm labourers at
Tolpuddle in Dorset was
transported to Australia
for swearing an oath of
loyalty to it. However,
Owen's ideals were
revived ten years later by
a group of trade unionists
in Rochdale, Lancashire,
who founded the first Co-
Operative movement, in
which all members would
sink their subscription
into a central fund, which
would be used to maintain
a Co-Operative shop
that could sell goods to
members at lower prices
than elsewhere. Co-Op
shops are still found on
the high street today.

Chartism

A working-class political
movement in the 1830s
and 1840s. It derived its
name from the People's
Charter, drawn up in
1838, which laid out a
comprehensive set of
proposals for the reform of
Parliament.

the role found to have been played by women in organizations
like Owenism and Chartism, which have gone down in history
as masculine preserves. 1 The effect of such studies was to demon-
strate that women had a history, not only in a separate strand, but
as an integral element of ‘mainstream’ history.

In the course of assembling historical material supportive of
feminist objectives, women’s historians touched the concerns
of several established branches of history. Initially their impact
was least in the field of political history, since until the twentieth
century women had no standing in political systems. The principal
impact of women’s history was on social history. This was an
obvious consequence of the priority given by feminism to ordinary
women’s lives, and the existing social history was on particularly
weak ground in justifying its prevalent male-centred perspective.
One example of the social emphasis of women’s history was its
engagement with labour history. Accounting for the ebb and flow
of women’s employment since the Industrial Revolution proved
to be an illuminating angle on the workings of capitalism -
whether the focus was on female spinners and weavers in the early
Lancashire cotton mills or the munitions workers who substituted
for men at the front during the First World War. 2

It is with regard to the family that the social impact of
women’s history has been greatest. Historians in the 1960s had
conducted a rather narrow debate about household size and levels
of fertility, mostly using quantitative analysis. 3 Other scholars
had studied the family through the lens of didactic literature -
the homilies that have been written in every generation to advise
couples how to behave towards each other and how to raise their
children. The new focus on women drew attention to the internal
dynamics of the family in terms of power, nurture and depend-
ence. A variety of qualitative sources - court records, diaries,
letters - were scoured for evidence, not of the statistical norm,
but of life as it was actually experienced in specific families.
Particularly striking has been the uncovering of the reality behind
the ornamental ‘angel mother’ of Victorian family piety: she was
more independent, more given to philanthropic work outside the
home, and more likely to be in conflict with her husband than the
popular stereotype suggests. 4 As a result of this and other work,
the whole realm of the private - as distinct from the public world
of conventional history - is being brought within the scope of
historical understanding.

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

277

An early modem case-study

The book that best sums up this phase of women’s history is Olwen
Hufton’s The Prospect Before Her (1995), an extraordinarily
wide-ranging and learned survey of women in Europe from 1500
to 1800. It is structured around the defining phases of women’s
life cycle from girlhood through marriage and motherhood to
widowhood. Special attention is given to those who stood outside
the conventional life story - single women, nuns, sex workers, and
so on. Hufton’s book is social history on a grand scale, in which
large generalizations are combined with vivid incidents in indi-
vidual lives. Viewed critically as a piece of women’s history, the
most important point about The Prospect Before Her is that the
many historical contexts in which women lived during this period
are fully mastered and deftly interwoven with the analysis. This
is particularly true of religion: the Reformation and its profound
consequences for all branches of Christianity are highlighted, in a
way which for many readers brings home the historical distance
between them and their Early Modern forebears.

Hufton’s work also raises the question of audience. The first
forays in women’s history had been written for a readership
that was not only female but feminist, in that it was looking for
a politically relevant reading of the past. The Prospect Before
Her is addressed more to the generality of historians. It not only
contextualizes women’s past experience; it makes that experi-
ence manifestly part of the more familiar themes of the period,
like poverty, domestic service and religious vocation. It is thus a
major contribution to the social history of early modern Europe.
In this respect Hufton was in tune with the younger generation of
women’s historians who were coming to the fore during the 1980s
and 1990s. They were less interested in raising feminist conscious-
ness than in changing the terms on which the study of history was
pursued.

angel mother

The image, often found
in Victorian literature
and popular culture, of
a mother who is at once
beautiful, caring, dutiful
and obedient.

Moving on from ‘women’s history’

As a mature historical practice women’s history is today charac-
terized by three principles which together open the way for its
integration into mainstream history. First, ‘woman’ is no longer
seen as a single undifferentiated social category. Class, race and
cultural beliefs about sexual difference have all had an immense

278

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

influence on how women are perceived - and also on how they
perceive themselves - and most historical work relates to specific
groups rather than womanhood in general. This enhances the
bearing of women’s history on social history, where these distinc-
tions are central. Second, just as the category of ‘woman’ has been
disaggregated, so too has the notion of a uniform and constant
oppression by men. The term ‘patriarchy’ has been criticized as
implying that sexual difference is the fundamental principle of
stratification in human society, present in all periods and thus
‘outside’ history; by claiming to explain everything, it explains
nothing. ‘Patriarchy’ can still usefully be used to denote sexual
hierarchy in the household, particularly where men control a form
of domestic production, as they did in pre-industrial Europe. But
the record of the past shows immense variety in the extent of
oppression, resistance, accommodation and convergence in rela-
tions between men and women, and the task of the historian is
to explain this variation rather than subsume it under a universal
principle of sexual oppression . 5

Third and most challenging of all, women’s history has
increasingly taken the history of men within its scope: not men in
their traditional guise of genderless autonomous beings, but men
in relation to the other half of humanity. This means that men
are considered historically as sons and husbands, while in the
public sphere men’s exclusion of women becomes a matter for
investigation, instead of being taken for granted. As Jane Lewis
has put it,

our understanding of the sex/gender system can never hope to be

complete until we have a deliberate attempt to understand the total

fabric of men’s worlds and the construction of masculinity . 6

That last phrase stands for a very extensive historical agenda.
History may have been a male monopoly for centuries, but under-
standing masculinity was not part of the project. As a result of
work in this area, we now take for granted, for example, that the
soldiers who manned the trenches in the First World War were
motivated not just by the call of king and country, but by a code
of masculinity instilled by school, juvenile literature and youth
organizations . 7

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

279

II

Gender history and relations between the sexes

These new directions in women’s history entail a change of name:
gender history signals the aspiration to move beyond an exclu-
sively women’s perspective to modify the writing of all history.
It is by no means the only current within women’s history, but
it holds out the greatest promise for the discipline as a whole. In
current usage ‘gender’ means the social organization of sexual
difference. It embodies the assumption that most of what passes
for natural (or God-given) sexual difference is in fact socially and
culturally constructed, and must therefore be understood as the
outcome of historical process. (Of course it is that very confu-
sion between nature and culture that has given stratification by
gender such staying power, and has caused it to escape notice
in much of the historical record.) The focus of gender history
is less on the predicament of one sex than on the whole field of
relations between the sexes. And this field includes not just the
obvious points of contact such as marriage and sex, but all social
relations and all political institutions which, on this view, are in
varying degrees structured by gender: by the exclusion of women,
by the polarization of masculine and feminine attributes, and so
on. Men are no less constructed by gender than women are. Both
men’s social power and their ‘masculine’ qualities can only be
apprehended as aspects of a gender system: neither ‘natural’ nor
constant, but defined by a shifting relation to the feminine. This
perspective underlies recent writing on the tortuous evolution of
the term ‘manliness’ since the early modern period, and the best
work on the history of the family. 8 Because both sexes can only
be correctly understood in relational terms, the history of gender
is conceptually equipped to attain a fully comprehensive social
reach and to feature in any serious theory of social structure and
social change.

Gender history and Marxist theory

Comparisons with Marxist history are illuminating. Gender
history has experienced the same tension between the demands
of historical explanation and the politics of emancipation as the
history of class has done. With its potential for a comprehensive
social analysis, gender history also promises at the very least to

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

make good some of the deficiencies of Marxist theory. Marxist
historians are second to none in analysing production, but their
theory gives much less weight to reproduction - whether viewed
as a biological event or a process of socialization. More broadly,
gender history has the effect of collapsing the rigid distinction
between the public and private spheres which has informed almost
all historical writing. That this distinction may have obscured the
true complexity of economic and social life in the past is strongly
indicated by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family
Fortunes (1987). Their central thesis is that in early nineteenth-
century England one of the key objectives of the burgeoning
business world was to support the family and domesticity - and
conversely that the approved domestic traits of middle-class men
(sobriety, sense of duty and so on) answered to the requirements
of entrepreneurial and professional life. In work of this kind, the
historical relationship of gender and class begins to be uncovered
in all its intricate particularity.

Ill

Gender and the cultural history of meaning

Thus far I have characterized gender as a tool for deepening our
understanding of the social structures of the past. But gender
is not only a structural question. It touches on subjectivity and
identity in profound ways. These perspectives are best considered
as the province of the cultural turn. They do not have the same
political resonance as the classic feminist agenda of conscious-
ness-raising, patriarchy and resistance. Indeed the popularity of
cultural approaches to women’s history reflects in many cases a
disenchantment with political feminism - as having either gone
far enough or being doomed to failure in attempting to achieve
more. The cultural turn is also in tune with broader contempo-
rary changes in gender and sexuality. Sexual difference is today
seen less as a biological given, and increasingly as a matter of
personal choice, mediated by culture. Once the traditional binary
distinction between male and female is modified to take account
of the gender diversity that actually exists, the articulation of
masculinities and femininities becomes more and more a matter of
psychology and culture. Last, the cultural turn bears on the vexed
question of primary evidence - always a problem for historians

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

281

bent on recovering a hidden past. The cultural turn makes a virtue
of the paucity of documentation by reading the texts as ‘discourse’:
not imprisoned within a single meaning, but open to diverse - and
even subversive - readings.

The cultural creation of gender

In practical terms, this shift means two things. First, if gender
difference is not principally a matter of nature or instinct, it must
be instilled. Parents may experience this as an individual task, but
it is essentially cultural in character, since those who are charged
with childcare operate within certain cultural understandings of
sexual difference and personality development. Gender, in short,
is knowledge. Until the very recent past, sexual difference was
naturalized (and simplified) into predetermined scripts which most
people did not question. Those forms of knowledge took a variety
of forms: explicit knowledge about the body, as in sex manuals
such as Aristotle’s Masterpiece (repeatedly reprinted in England
throughout the eighteenth century and beyond); or heavily mor-
alized teaching about sexual character, as in nineteenth-century
writings about the proper lady; or again, the assumptions about
sexual difference that pervade literature in both its elite and
popular forms. Recent historians have given close attention to
all this material, tracking the contradictions and subtle shifts of
emphasis against the bedrock assumptions that remained firm for
generations . 9

The second dimension of the cultural approach to gender
takes up the issue of difference. All social identities work partly
by a process of exclusion. We are defined as much by what we
are not, as by what we are. Often the negative stereotyping of
those beyond the pale is just as powerful as the corresponding
belief in what members have in common. In the case of sexual
difference, defining the self in relation to ‘the other’ is particu-
larly pronounced because the social consciousness of most young
children is predicated on a fundamental distinction between male
and female. All attributes can be mapped on to this binary oppo-
sition. Hence all gender definitions are relational, in the sense
that they arise from interaction with the other sex and express
assumptions about that sex: the enduring discourse of ‘effemi-
nacy’ as a boundary for men’s behaviour bears ample witness to
that. Discourse is vital to this process of ‘othering’, partly because

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Jacques Lacan
( 1901 - 81 )

One of the most influential
psychoanalysts of the
twentieth century. A
French Freudian, he
developed a 'structural
psychoanalysis' which
explored the relationship
between language, texts
and the unconscious. Fie
became a central theorist
for the linguistic turn,
and thus for an influential
strand of cultural studies.
Although Lacan had little
to say about history, he
has been drawn upon by
psychoanalytic historians.

binary structures are deeply embedded in language (good v. bad,
black v. white, etc.), and partly because language registers this
opposition between male and female in an endless variety of cul-
turally specific forms. In psychoanalysis the tradition associated
with Jacques Lacan also places prime emphasis on language as the
means by which children acquire their sexed identities. 10

One field in which the discourse approach has proved particu-
larly fruitful is the history of sexuality. As defined in recent work,
this is a broader theme than might be imagined. It can be studied
through the prism of medical knowledge, or as a set of legal
definitions and prohibitions, reflected in the social mores of the
day. 11 The approach that has most resonance with contemporary
sexual politics prioritizes the question of identity. At what point,
for example, did men and women begin to categorize themselves
- and each other - as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’? And
were these exclusive categories? The answers given by historians
have become more complicated since the pioneering studies in
the 1970s. Matt Houlbrook shows that in the first half of the
twentieth century ‘queer London’ did not comprise a single homo-
sexual identity. He draws on a range of vivid personal evidence
to distinguish three types: the effeminate self-dramatizing ‘queen’,
the discreet middle-class homosexual, and the working-class man
who had sex with both women and men and regarded himself as
‘normal’. In the period covered by Houlbrook all homosexual acts
were still against the law. The story he tells is as much concerned
with evasion and entrapment as with self-discovery - a reminder
that homophobia has deep historical roots. 12

Gender and the new polarities of power

The fracturing of identity that is now found in gay history and
other branches of gender history is a far cry from the earlier
feminist emphasis on the common experience and common
oppression summed up in ‘sisterhood.’ Once representation and
discourse are given full play, ‘identity’ cannot be frozen at this
macro-level; dissecting the complex web of meanings in which
individuals situate themselves has the effect of breaking down
these large categories by opening up fissures along lines of class,
nation, ethnicity, region, age, sexuality and so on. The notion
of women as a collectivity becomes hard to sustain. That does
not mean, however, that gender has become drained of political

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

283

content; instead gender history reflects a different kind of politics.
Joan Scott argues strongly that a linguistic approach serves to
expose the gender dimension of all power relations. Her argu-
ment hinges on two closely related propositions. First, gender is
a structural (or ‘constitutive’) element of all social relationships,
from the most intimate to the most impersonal, because there is
always an assumption either of the exclusion of one sex, or of a
carefully regulated (and usually unequal) relationship between the
sexes. Second, gender is an important way in which relationships
of power are signified in cultural terms. 13 To take a recurrent case,
the uncompromisingly ‘masculine’ terms in which war is referred
to have for a very long time served to legitimate the sacrifice of
life that young men are called upon to endure. In the Victorian era
the idea of state-funded welfare was damned as ‘sentimentality’
- a feminine attribute - by its enemies. 14 Many other comparable
examples could be cited. Furthermore, these gendered meanings
should not be seen as static or given, and an obvious task for
politically informed analysis is to trace their reinterpretation and
contestation in different contexts. Gender history of the cultural
variety may be resistant to the solid collectivities of old, but it has
much to contribute to an understanding of how power is articu-
lated in personal and social relations

This point can be illustrated with reference to the scholarly
career of Judith Walkowitz. Her first book, published in 1980,
analysed prostitution in Victorian society through the prism of
class and gender: it documented the double sexual standard of
the day, the material exploitation of the prostitutes, and the
political strategies of those who wished to repeal the draconian
legislation that regulated the trade. Its political sympathies were
plain - indeed the help of the Women’s Liberation movement is
explicitly acknowledged. 15 Twelve years later Walkowitz followed
this up with City of Dreadful Delight (1992), a study of sexual
scandals and sexual discourses in London during the 1880s.
Within the perspective of the earlier book, child prostitution and
Jack the Ripper - the main subjects here - would have invited
a materialist analysis of the vice trade and the power relations
between procurers, prostitutes and clients. These matters are not
ignored, but Walkowitz is now less interested in what happened
than in what was represented as happening. The book’s subtitle,
‘Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London’, accu-
rately reflects her concern with which stories prevailed and why.

draconian

Excessively harsh.

Jack the Ripper

The nickname current
at the time and since
for the perpetrator of a
series of extremely brutal
murders of prostitutes
in Whitechapel, in the
East End of London,
in 1888. Speculation
about the identity of the
murderer, which has led
to accusations against,
among others, a famous
painter and a member
of the royal family, has
spawned a virtual industry
of 'ripperologists'. The
fascination the case
continues to exert is as
interesting to historians
as the original murders
themselves.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

The notorious 'Jack
the Ripper' murders of
1 888 provide a case
study not only of crime
and prostitution in late
Victorian London but also
of the collective cultural
mentality that found the
murders so fascinating.
(Topfoto/Topham/
Picturepoint)

Police » mm

But, as she emphasizes, this is a deeply political question, since
popular notions of sexual character and sexual morality were
contained within a regulatory discourse, of which the newspaper
press was merely one element. City of Dreadful Delight may lack
the political bite of the earlier book, but it is a fine study of the
cultural processes that make some gender discourses hegemonic,
while marginalizing others.

There can, then, be no simple answer to the question ‘What
has gender history contributed to the discipline as a whole?’
Writing about gender has become integral to both social history
and cultural history, as Walkowitz’s trajectory suggests. It is no
longer acceptable for historians to write about ‘the people’ or
‘the working class’ without dealing explicitly with women. And
they are unlikely to do so without closely qualifying the category
of ‘woman’ according to the specific historical context. As Susan
Pedersen has put it,

If cultural history . . . has accomplished anything, it has been to call
into question the assumption that one can evaluate gender relations in
different societies by a single standard . 16

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

285

Equally, questions of cultural identity are complex and conten-
tious; but gender is always part of the mix - not as a ready-made
theory, but as an open-ended cluster of issues to do with the
experience and representation of gendered lives. Last, as a
metaphorical language gender has been taken up by political his-
torians, thus enriching our understanding of political culture and
its purchase on the political community.

IV

Postcolonialism: a new paradigm

Postcolonial history, like gender history, takes as its starting point
the marginalization or dispossession of a large category of people
in the past. But its scope is much wider. While global or com-
parative studies are not unknown in gender history, it has usually
been conceptualized within national boundaries, and often at the
level of the local community. Postcolonial history, on the other
hand, is intrinsically global. Local studies abound, but they are
premised on the salience of global relations: not in the anodyne
sense so often conveyed by analysts of contemporary globaliza-
tion, but in terms of the relations of power and subordination
that account for the parlous condition of so many Third World
societies. The 500-year long colonial project of the West is seen
to have impoverished and humiliated those societies. Rescuing
their history from the patronizing stereotypes of Westerners is a
precondition for their emancipation. But for postcolonial scholars
a question-mark hangs over the academic discourse of history as
the West has understood it, for historians were deeply implicated
in the silencing of non-Western traditions. The outcome has been
some disturbing critiques in which major doubts have been aired
about the validity of history as a scholarly pursuit.

About the longstanding exclusion of colonized societies from
the scope of historical study there can be no doubt. To go no
further back than the emergence of the historical profession in the
nineteenth century, Ranke confined his huge output of historical
writing to the European sub-continent. His Universal History,
on which he was working when he died in 1886, was a history
of Europe from the last centuries of the Roman Empire. His
successors and imitators worked within a national frame which
sometimes included the empire builders of the past, but not the

286

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

societies on which they preyed. Marx had broader interests. He
wrote perceptive commentaries on events in India, but India itself
he regarded as being outside history because its mode of produc-
tion lacked an internal dynamic of change: in order to share the
progressive development of Western societies, it needed to be
conquered and administered by one of those societies, which
is why Marx regarded British rule in India as broadly positive.
At a theoretical level at least, it could not be denied that India
and China had a history, since there was evidently some parallel
between their sophisticated state structures and those of Europe.
But Africa was denied even this qualification for historical study
because it was wrongly assumed to have evolved no state struc-
tures at all.

The ending of formal colonial rule was one of the most striking
features of world history in the twentieth century. Within the
space of twenty years (1947-66) most of the countries of South
Asia and Africa became independent. (The only precedent was
the emancipation of the American colonies held by Britain, Spain
and Portugal between 1776 and 1822). However, independence
brought equality in only the most formal sense: in many coun-
tries the dependence and impoverishment that had characterized
colonial status intensified during the first decades of self-rule.
At the same time, sovereign peoples could not be patronized in
quite such a brutal fashion as they had been under colonial rule.
Their leaders were in many cases highly educated and well versed
in Western thought. One of the priorities of these states was the
development of a modern education system, including entirely
new institutions of higher education. Historical research was
conducted in the universities of Third World countries in order to
furnish the schools with a history curriculum appropriate to an
independent nation: one very practical reason why the time was
ripe for a reappraisal of the colonial relationship and its enduring
legacy.

But the implications of that reappraisal are complex. At first
glance ‘postcolonial’ is simply a convenient chronological marker,
designating our age as one in which colonialism has been disman-
tled; it could even be taken to mean that the colonial era lies in the
past and should remain there while we focus on the future. That
is not how the label ‘postcolonial’ is interpreted by the scholars
who have adopted it for themselves. Their contention is that colo-
nialism used its control over the resources of learning and culture

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

287

to establish forms of knowledge that not only gave Europeans a
distorted picture of colonial societies, but were internalized by
the colonized themselves. Those distortions persist, inhibiting
the development of ex-colonies to this day. For this reason the
superficial temporal reading of the term ‘postcolonial’ is rejected:
colonialism has not really ended but continues in less formal and
more covert ways (sometimes referred to as ‘neo-colonialism’).
A still more radical strand of postcolonialism maintains that
because Western learning served so long as a means of subor-
dinating colonial societies, its intellectual standing - embracing
the entire Enlightenment tradition - is fatally compromised. At
this point postcolonialism moves beyond the colonial world and
becomes - alongside Postmodernism - a further strand in the
negative critique of the Western intellectual tradition.

Theorists from the Third World and the West

Postcolonialism sounds like the authentic voice of the Third
World, and in one sense it is. The leading lights - Edward Said,
Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - come or came
from the Middle East or South Asia. But - with the notable excep-
tion of Said - their writings are abstract and opaque (not least
to readers in their countries of origin). All three are (or were)
employed by American universities. Furthermore, despite the
rejection of European thought that is sometimes proclaimed by
postcolonial scholars, their theories are not home-grown, but are
derived from some of the most high-profile Western intellectuals.
But it is the rebels and the radicals who have inspired them, rather
than the liberals or even the Marxists. Much the most impor-
tant influence is Foucault. As explained in Chapter 7, Foucault
regarded all discourses as forms of power/knowledge, which
served to confine people within specific ways of understanding
the world and their place in it. According to Foucault, language
is not just one variant of power; it is the most important kind of
power. Because the users of language are not aware of being con-
strained, they mistakenly suppose that it expresses the world as it
is. Edward Said, the most influential postcolonial theorist, applied
Foucault’s thinking to Western writing about the Arab world
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Said was a literary
scholar rather than a historian, but his path-breaking Orientalism
(1978) is deeply versed in historical representations of the Middle

288

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Western portrayals of
Oriental life emphasized
its otherness by displaying
women as sex objects and
sex slaves. The Women of
Algiers (1 834) by Eugene
Delacroix is a relatively
restrained depiction of a
harem.

(Bridgeman Art Library/
Louvre, Paris, France/
Ciraudon)

East. His analysis was based on the idea that when one culture
seeks to represent another, the power function of discourse is
intensified because it is attempting to pin down the Other - a
cultural construct perceived as a pathological opposite of one’s
own culture. Repeated over many decades, the rendering of the
Arab Other hardened into a set of essentialist judgements which
Said called ‘Orientalism’. It permeated the views of ‘experts’ on
the Arab world, administrators posted to colonial territories in
the Middle East, and - most insidiously - many Arabs educated
in the Western tradition who were encouraged to reject their own
culture. Orientalism gave imperialists the confidence to dominate,
and it undermined the cultural resources of the colonized. Said
summed up Orientalism as a ‘science of imperialism’, his goal
being to ‘reduce the effects of imperialist shackles on thought and
human relations ’. 17

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

289

V

Race and racism

One of those shackles was the concept of ‘race’. During the
colonial era racist ideologies were developed to explain the
supposed inferiority of ‘native’ peoples - both their indigenous
culture and their inability to assimilate Western culture. ‘Race’
was treated as fixed and biologically determined, which logically
meant that Western domination should last indefinitely; indeed
some racist writers argued that white and black were on different
evolutionary paths. Highly derogatory stereotypes of other races
served in turn to sustain a flattering self-image of the British - or
French or German - ‘race.’ The postcolonial reaction has taken
two antithetical forms. Minorities with a strong ethnic identity
have constructed what might be called a ‘reverse discourse’; they
embrace the concept of ‘race’ because the term brings biological
descent and culture together in a powerful amalgam that maxi-
mizes group cohesion and emphasizes distance from other groups.
Among black people in America and Britain there is considerable
support for Afrocentrism - the belief in an absolute sense of
ethnic difference and in the transmission of an authentic cultural
tradition from Africa to black people of the modern diaspora. It
is no accident that this way of thinking is strongest among people
of African descent: it is an understandable reaction to centuries
of enslavement which was an assault on their cultural identity
as well as their human dignity. But Afrocentrism is based on
ahistorical assumptions. It is as essentialist as the white forms of
racism against which it is mobilized. Very few nations or racial
groups have ever been ethnically homogeneous. The societies of
the African diaspora have been in close - and sometimes intimate
- contact with white communities for five centuries, and their
character has been deeply influenced by that contact (as has that
of white society). The formation of racial and national identities is
never a once-and-for-all event, but an unfolding process . 18

Instead of making a mirror-image out of colonial racism, a
more radical approach is to dispute the premise of race alto-
gether, and this is what the mainstream of postcolonial thinking
sets out to do. Biology is deemed irrelevant, because the
physical differences between races are either non-existent or super-
ficial. What may appear to be ‘racial’ difference is the outcome
of cultural adaptation, including contact with other cultures. The

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Metropole

'Metropole' used to mean
the same as 'metropolis'.
In academic writing it
denotes an imperialist
nation that has been at
the centre of a global
network of trade and
exploitation (for example,
Britain and the United
States).

significant point about colonial discourse was that it seized on these
specificities as evidence of an unbridgeable gulf between white and
black. ‘Race’ itself became the centerpiece of colonial discourse,
bolstering the self-confidence of the colonist and marginalizing the
colonized. Demonstrating the social construction of race in this way
is all the more important because colonial-style racism has not dis-
appeared. It still mars relations between the West and Third World
countries, as well as the white perception of black communities in
the former colonial metropoles such as Britain.

One of the reasons why postcolonialism has proved a rich vein
for historians is the different emphases within the theory. Much
has been made of some of the contradictions in Said’s work. There
is something uncompromising - even rigid - about his rendering
of the West’s cultural dominance over the East. Orientalism is
presented as an all-powerful fiction which eliminated other cul-
tural responses on the part of Westerners. But as Homi Bhabha
has pointed out, within a colonial relationship there was room
for cultural adaptation, as each side was drawn to traits of the
other through desire or ambition: for him hybridity is the key to
the colonial encounter . 19 The boundaries of colony and metropole
were porous, making for a single field. A related issue is how all-
powerful colonial discourses should be taken to be. Said inscribes
a binary distinction of powerful/powerless on the colonizer and
the colonized, allowing little scope for the latter to make responses
that are not choreographed by the oppressor. Other writers rec-
ognize that the colonial subject could manipulate the discursive
categories of the West, even turning them to account as tools of
resistance, with the result that colonial rule was more precarious
than it appeared . 20 Much here turns on how we see the indigenous
elite who straddled traditional and Western culture: were they
creatures of colonial discourse or potentially autonomous actors?
At the same time, this debate tends to operate at a high level of
abstraction. It is rare to find a postcolonial theorist who acknowl-
edges a role for individual or even collective agency.

VI

Historians and postcolonialism

How then have historians made use of a body of theory that in
some ways is quite antithetical to the habitual practice of their

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

291

discipline? We can begin by looking at how historians responded
more broadly to the ending of the colonial era. Africa is the
prime example, since nowhere else had the colonial ignorance
of the indigenous past been so profound. The 1960s and 1970s
saw an impressive output of scholarly works of African history,
written partly by African scholars trained in the West, and partly
by young Western scholars who identified with the aspirations of
African independence. They set themselves to confound the twin
assumptions that Africa had no history apart from the activities of
outsiders, and no historical evidence that might substantiate such
a history. In fact the documentary resources proved much richer
than anyone had supposed. The European trading companies and
missionary societies, which had been in contact with Africa since
the fifteenth century and by the nineteenth century had penetrated
deep into the interior, were found to have extensive records; these
included close observation of local chiefdoms on whose support
the incomers depended, as well as descriptions of African culture
and society. In the Islamic regions of the Sahel, the western
Sudan and the East African coast, where the frontiers of literacy
extended far into black Africa, there are local chronicles dating
back in some cases to the sixteenth century, and even - in a few
states such as the Sokoto caliphate of northern Nigeria - a nucleus
of administrative records.

Most exciting of all was the development of a methodology
for collecting and interpreting oral tradition. This was a uni-
versal feature of pre-literate societies, and conversely destined to
wither away as literacy spread. The first generation of independ-
ence was therefore a privileged moment in capitalizing on ‘the
heritage of the ears’ (see below, Chapter 11). Pre-colonial polit-
ical entities like the medieval states of Ghana and Zimbabwe
now emerged into the light of history, and the early stages of
incorporation of the African interior into the overseas commerce
were reconstructed. The colonial period had been studied by his-
torians, but from the perspective of the colonizers, as the story
of development and of statesmanlike preparation for independ-
ence. Now it featured the theme of resistance - armed resistance
to the initial colonial occupiers, and political mobilization
against the colonial state during the approach to independence.
But historians also focused on more accommodating responses,
particularly peasant initiatives that were intended to support the
beginnings of a consumer economy. 21

Sokoto caliphate

The most powerful Islamic
state in West Africa in
the nineteenth century,
centred on what is now
northern Nigeria. It
expanded by means of
jihad (holy war). Sokoto
was brought under British
rule at the beginning of
the twentieth century,
but its ruler retained
considerable authority
during the colonial era.

Ghana

West African state that
flourished between
the ninth and eleventh
centuries. The basis of its
prosperity was the trans-
Saharan trade, particularly
in gold. The medieval state
lay well to the north of the
present-day Ghana.

Zimbabwe

Central African state that
flourished between the
eleventh and fourteenth
centuries. It is famous
for its technically
accomplished dry-stone
architecture, notably the
ruins of Great Zimbabwe.
The modern state of
Zimbabwe takes its
name from its medieval
predecessor.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

This pioneer work in African history was largely innocent of
theory. Its practitioners were for the most part confident that the
well-tried methods of Western historiography would serve them
well. Colonial records required nothing more than the habitual
scepticism of the archival researcher. Even the novel resource of
oral tradition attracted comparatively little theoretical analysis at
this stage. 22

Jawaharlal Nehru
( 1 889 - 1 964 )

India's first Prime Minister,
from 1947 to 1962.

Antonio Cramsci
( 1891 - 1937 )

A leading figure in the
Italian Communist Party
after the First World
War, he was imprisoned
by the Fascist regime
of Mussolini and died
in prison. His immense
influence stems from his
theoretical writings, in
which he developed new
ways of understanding
popular political culture
and the pre-conditions of
revolution.

Subaltern Studies

It was in India during the 1980s that postcolonial theory made
a decided impact on historians for the first time. This was the
achievement of the Subaltern Studies group, led by Ranajit Guha.
Initially its point of reference was Marxist history, especially
the ‘history from below’ associated with E.P. Thompson. The
orientation of the group was defined by a profound rejection of
the nationalist elite in India - men like Nehru and the leaders
of the Indian National Congress who had channelled popular
resistance to the British Raj and had then inherited control of the
state apparatus in 1947. Ideologically, the Subaltern historians
claimed there was little to choose between the nationalist politi-
cians and the historians who chronicled their achievements. Both
belonged to the ‘bourgeois-nationalist elite’, far removed from the
interests and the attitudes of ordinary Indians. Elence the choice
of the term ‘subaltern:’ it was drawn from the Marxist thinker
Antonio Gramsci to denote disempowered social groups. The task
of radical historians was to shift the focus from the professional
politician to the subaltern, and in particular to reveal the subal-
tern’s place at the heart of popular nationalism. This aspiration
was all the more convincing because the frequency of popular
disturbances from 1919 in British India was undeniable: what was
lacking was a historical account that went beyond elite response
and elite manipulation.

Framed in this way, Subaltern Studies was a predictable ‘peo-
ple’s history’ reaction against nationalist historiography (though it
is worth pointing out that in Africa the radical rejection of nation-
alism was much weaker). Very quickly, however, the Subaltern
historians came under the influence of Said and other postcolonial
theorists. The emphasis shifted from material to cultural power, as
more and more attention was given to deconstructing what the colo-
nial authorities had written in such profusion. Part of the reason for

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

293

doing so was to demonstrate how much of what (even now) counts
as objective knowledge represented a discursive imposition by the
colonial regime: in India the classic instance is ‘caste’ (in Africa it
is ‘tribe’). But the main purpose of this close textual study was to
make up for the silencing of the poor that had occurred throughout
the colonial period and which (it was said) was replicated in the
writings of the first generation of post-independence historians.
Peasants and workers would be brought into the light of history
despite the extent of popular illiteracy under the Raj: ‘the voice
of the subaltern’ would be heard. Guha and his colleagues strove
to overcome the paucity of subaltern writing by reading the volu-
minous government sources against the grain. Guha’s own work
on peasant insurgency in colonial India suggests that a partial
restoration of the peasant voice is possible, based on official eaves-
dropping or ‘intercepted discourse.’ As he explains, government
counter-insurgency compulsively recorded whatever might have
a bearing on rebel activities - be it rumours in the bazaar, slogans
shouted in the street, or incidental detail in court evidence. 23

VII

The postcolonial reappraisal of British history

Postcolonialism originated in a determination to change the
conceptual map by which Third World cultures were studied.
But colonialism was a two-sided relationship that also changed
the culture and mentality of the colonizing society. In the past
this theme received even less attention from historians than the
colonial impact overseas. In the British case there is a long tra-
dition of regarding the empire as ‘out there’ - a destination for
British enterprise and conquest, but without a significant imprint
on metropolitan life. Postcolonial theory subjects that assump-
tion to critical scrutiny, based on the proposition that colony and
metropole were parts of a single system, with influences flowing
in both directions. As Antoinette Burton puts it, the empire was
‘not just a phenomenon “out there”, but a fundamental and con-
stitutive part of English culture and national identity at home’. 24
It follows that the end of empire makes Britain - no less than its
former dependencies - a postcolonial society.

So far from being ‘out there’ the empire was integral to British
life for 300 years, and became more obviously so as it neared

Mansfield Park

Novel by Jane Austen,
published in 1814. Like all
Austen's novels, the book
concerns the marriage
prospects of young ladies
of the propertied class. It
is not a novel about the
empire. At the same time,
it is made clear that the
family wealth is based
on slavery plantations
in the West Indies, and
Sir Thomas Bertram's
prolonged absence
from the family home is
explained by the need
to attend to his affairs in
Antigua.

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

its end. This was not just a matter of registering the proportion
of pink on the world map (a universal experience for British
schoolchildren). Edward Said maintained that the literary canon
of nineteenth and twentieth-century England was permeated by
an imperial consciousness (most controversially in Jane Austen’s
novel, Mansfield Park). But the nub of the argument concerns the
experiences that were shared by the British people as a whole.
By 1900 most families had kin living in the colonies; virtually
everyone consumed colonial products whose provenance was
carefully labelled; adventure fiction and boys’ stories were staged
against a colonial backdrop. These were the constituents of an
imperial culture. Indeed, the argument has been advanced that it
was colonialism that made it possible for British people to think
of themselves (as distinct from their English or Scottish selves)
as a nation. 25 The converse of that proposition would be that
Britishness is in radical need of redefining now that the empire
is no more. It is hardly surprising, then, that debates around
this issue feature not just in postcolonial history, but in polemic
intended for a wider audience, notably in the work of Paul
Gilroy. 26

Said’s work on Orientalism portrayed a unified West imposing
a unified discourse on the East. Even at the cultural level
(with which he was exclusively concerned) this now looks like
an oversimplification. Without downplaying the violence and
authoritarianism of empire, postcolonial historians emphasize
the two-way flow of influences, not all of which ministered
directly to power. As Catherine Hall has explained, the histories
of ‘metropolis’ and ‘peripheries’ do not follow a simple binary
model. 27 In her book Civilising Subjects (2002), she treats Jamaica
and Birmingham as interlocking - and equally important - sites
of empire in the mid-nineteenth century. Only with this double
focus, Hall argues, can we understand both British popular atti-
tudes towards the empire and the political culture of the ex-slaves
in the Caribbean; and she gives special weight to the missionaries
who were the main channel of communication between Jamaica
and Birmingham. Colonial realities sometimes impinged on the
metropolitan imagination in unexpected ways. In the 1790s Mary
Wollstonecraft bolstered the case for women’s rights by drawing
an analogy with plantation slavery (there were more than eighty
references to slavery in her celebrated Vindication of the Rights
of 'Women). 2 * In a less constructive way, colonial ideas of race

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

295

were superimposed on social distinctions back home - as in the
‘racialisation’ of the London poor in the mid-Victorian period. 29
Most striking of all was the profound cultural adjustment made
by all immigrant communities living in Britain, which suggests
that Bhabha’s notion of hybridity has even more purchase in met-
ropolitan society than it does in the colonies.

The debate about the connections between Britishness and
empire is complicated by the fact that different sectors of the
British population had - and have - radically divergent memories
of empire. Partly this is a dimension of the ‘three kingdoms’ prob-
lematic: the Scots and Irish were ubiquitous in the colonies, while
the levers of power lay in London with an English-dominated
government. But the key issue concerns the colonial immigrants
who settled in Britain. Large-scale black immigration only began
in the 1950s, just as the empire was being dismantled, but people
of African and Asian descent have been continuously present in
Britain since at least the sixteenth century, not just as curiosities
but in sufficient numbers to take their place in urban society, espe-
cially in London and the major ports. The fact that many of them
were slaves introduced into the metropole colonial relationships

the 'racialisation' of the
London poor

In the second half of
the nineteenth century,
educated people often
compared the poor to
the benighted heathen
overseas. The implication
was not only that the poor
were culturally and morally
inadequate, but that they
belonged to a separate
race.

West Indian emigrants
aboard theSS Empire
Wind rush (1 948), the first
ship to bring a large group
of West Indians to Britain.
The new arrivals had high
expectations of 'the mother
country', which were rudely
shattered by popular
hostility towards them.
(Getty Images/
Popperfoto)

296

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

and colonial racial stereotypes that have endured long after the
ending of slavery. As the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave
trade in 2007 showed, slavery still touches a raw nerve in Britain:
for many white people it has been subsumed in a self-regarding
narrative of national philanthropy, which addresses the end of
slavery rather than its long history. For many black people, on
the other hand, slavery and the slave trade should be treated as
another Holocaust, with an implied duty of compensation. Seldom
heard in this debate is the voice of black people in the past, for the
familiar reason that they feature so little in the primary sources:
few were literate, and fewer still had access to the public sphere
(hence the intense attention given to the handful of eighteenth-
century black propagandists against slavery).

VIII

Problems and obstacles

The difficulties inherent in finding a historical voice for the subal-
tern are real enough. An important strand in postcolonialism has
responded by questioning the validity of the academic discipline
that has framed their efforts hitherto: if historical research cannot
yield the desired perspective, then ‘history’ itself must be found
wanting. From a subaltern perspective the charge-sheet is compel-
ling. An obvious point is that during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries many historians took part in the Orientalist project, and
Said argued that in his own day there were influential historians
whose Oriental expertise was placed in the service of Western (par-
ticularly American) imperialism. But there is a broader point to
be made with regard to the structural imbalance between Western
history and all other histories - what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls
the problem of ‘asymmetric ignorance’. 30 Historians in the Third
World are expected to know European history, whereas most of
their counterparts in Europe are ignorant of the history of Asia
and Africa. The implication is that the ‘grand narratives’ of the
Western experience - nationalism, democracy, capitalism and so
on - are the benchmark against which other societies should be
measured. No one makes the reverse evaluation.

There are also troubling questions to be asked about the
colonial archive, which includes extensive documentation in the
former colonies and also the national archives of the metropolitan

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

297

countries. Not only did these archives reflect the prejudice and
ignorance of colonial officials; they were instruments of rule,
intended to mould social reality to the designs of the colonial
regime: no amount of ‘reading against the grain’ can take us into
the world of the subaltern. In a challenging article, ‘Can the sub-
altern speak?’, Spivak drew on the well-studied Hindu practice
of sati, which placed on widows the duty of throwing themselves
on the funeral pyre of their husbands. Historical research has
documented in detail the debates within the British administration
that led to the official proscription of sati in 1833, as well as the
arguments mounted for its retention by patriarchal traditionalists,
but the voice of the victims remains obdurately silent. 31

At the root of the postcolonial critique lies the relationship
between academic history and the nation-state. Because historians
have generally observed the boundaries of states, even when they
have not been chronicling the history of the state itself, their work
has had the effect of validating the nation-state as the pre-eminent
category of social organization and political identity. If critique
along these lines is current in Britain, it is still more pertinent in
a country like India, where the effect of a focus on ‘the nation’
is to exclude huge social categories from the agenda of history.
As Chakrabarty has put it, history is complicit ‘in assimilating to
the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human
solidarity’. 32 The secularism of Western historiography is open
to attack in comparable terms, as an ideological position that
is manifestly unable to engage with the spirituality of Indian
cultures. Some postcolonial scholars would go further still, dis-
missing the universal claims of the Enlightenment tradition as an
apologia for the West against all its Others. 33 In theory at least,
the way is open not only for authentically Third World histories,
but for entirely new perspectives on the West - what Chakrabarty
calls the ‘provincializing of Europe’.

Acknowledging the cultural turn

To read Dipesh Chakrabarty on postcolonial history or Joan Scott
on gender history is to doubt the future of the discipline of history
as it is practised by most scholars today. These writers (and others
like them) challenge the traditional academic ideals of scholarly
detachment, authentic re-creation and empirically grounded anal-
ysis, and they roundly attack those who subscribe to them. The

298

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

tone is similar to that adopted by Postmodernists, and that is no
accident. The more radical views of gender and postcoloniality
that I have described are compatible with Postmodernism: indeed
Joan Scott’s theoretical writings are generally placed under that
heading. However it should not be assumed that these radical
critiques will become the received wisdom of the profession in
the future. Working historians for the most part shrink from the
full implications of postcolonial or gender theory. The influence
of gender and postcolonialism on historical scholarship is to be
measured not in theoretical virtuosity, but in the way they have
projected new and illuminating perspectives into the scholarly
arena.

At the same time, recent developments in gender history
and postcolonial history clearly demonstrate the costs that are
incurred by embracing the cultural turn. There is little place here
for the material basis of social stratification or for the collective
agency of social groups pursuing their political ends. The fact that
power - whether exercised over a colony or over a subordinate
sex - has a cultural dimension does not mean that it is a cultural
phenomenon tout court. Academics may be beguiled by the power
of words and images, but for many of the groups they study power
was experienced in sharply material forms. That truth was more
evident in the first generation of scholarship in these fields than it
is now. A re-engagement with that tradition, without losing the
insights of cultural analysis, would be timely.

The history of the family

This is one of the areas where the history of gender has made a
decisive contribution. For many people ‘family history’ means the
recovery of their own genealogy and personal details about their
ancestors. Historians, on the other hand, are chiefly interested in
the family as a building block of society. The earliest studies were
demographic; they drew heavily on the census records, focusing
on family size, migration and relations with kin (as for example
Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century
Lancashire, f 971 ). Gender historians have put the spotlight on
the family as the formative site in the acquisition of gender and
sexual identities. This has involved a shift in research method,
with a far greater emphasis on personal documents, such as letters
and diaries (see, for example, Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

299

Daughter , 1998) The history of the working-class family still lags
behind, because of the much greater scarcity of these materials.

Independence in South Asia and Africa

The period between 1945 and 1980 marked the end of the
colonial era, after four centuries of European overseas expansion.
All the colonial powers - Britain, France, the Netherlands,
Portugal and Belgium - abandoned their colonies. In some cases
they were forced to do so by national liberation movements;
in other cases they withdrew with a good grace in the hope of
retaining influence in the future. The British withdrawal from
India and Pakistan in 1947 was marked by severe communal
violence. The independence of Ghana in 1957 set in train a rapid
sequence of decolonization, leading to independence for Nigeria
(1960), Kenya (1963) and many others countries. Independence
for Zimbabwe (1980) marked the end of this phase. Hong Kong
was not handed over to China until 1997.

Orientalism

In the eighteenth century European scholars developed a keen
interest in the history and culture of the ‘Orient’, a concept they
applied to an area ranging from North Africa and the Middle East
through the Indian subcontinent to China and Japan. In his 1978
book Orientalism , the literary scholar Edward Said argued that
this interest in fact reflected the Europeans’ sense of their own
superiority over what they saw as a romanticized and ‘mysterious’
East.

Further reading

Laura Lee Downs, Writing Gender History, Hodder Arnold, 2004.

Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Columbia University
Press, 1988.

Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical
Practice, Harvard University Press, 1998.

John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain,
Longman, 2005.

Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism, Longman, 2006.

300

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Edward Said, Orientalism, 3rd edn, Penguin, 2003.

Catherine Hall & Sonya O. Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire:
Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, Cambridge
University Press, 2006.

Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire, Manchester University Press,

2000.

Caroline Neale, Writing ‘Independent’ History: African Historiography,
1960-1980, Greenwood Press, 1985.

Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in
Western Europe, 1500-1800, Harper Collins, 1995.

Notes

1 Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement, Macmillan, 1991.

2 See for example, Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend:
Munitions Workers in the Great War, University of California Press,
1994.

3 Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (eds), Household and Family in Past
Time, Cambridge University Press, 1972.

4 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men
and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850, 2nd edn,
Hutchinson, 2002.

5 The classic airing of the pros and cons of patriarchy is the short
interventions of Sheila Rowbotham, Sally Alexander and Barbara
Taylor in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist
Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, pp. 363-73.

6 Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home
and Family 1850-1940, Blackwell, 1986, editor’s introduction,

p. 4. See also John Tosh, ‘What should historians do with
masculinity? Reflections on nineteenth-century Britain’, History
Workshop Journal, XXXVIII, 1994, pp. 179-202.

7 George L. Mosse, The Image of Men: The Creation of Modern
Masculinity, Oxford University Press, 1996, ch. 6.

8 Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern
England, Oxford University Press, 2003; John Tosh, Manliness
and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Longman, 2005;
Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes.

9 Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual
Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950, Yale University Press, 1995, ch. 2;
John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home
in Victorian England, Yale University Press, 1999.

GENDER HISTORY AND POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY

301

10 For a discussion of the implications of Lacan for gender historians,
see Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman and Other Essays in 19th
and 20th Century Feminist History, Virago, 1994, pp. 105-10,
225-30.

11 The classic work in the medical category is Thomas Laqueur, Making
Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University
Press, 1990. For the legal approach, see Harry Cocks, Nameless
Offences: Homosexual Desire in the 19th Century, I.B. Tauris, 2003,
and Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain,
1861-1913, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, ch. 4.

12 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual
Metropolis, 1918-1957, Chicago University Press, 2005.

13 Joan W. Scott, ‘Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis’,
American Historical Review, XCI, 1986, pp. 1053-75.

14 Stefan Collini, ‘The idea of “character” in Victorian political
thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series,
XXXV, 1985, pp. 29-50.

15 Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, Cambridge
University Press, 1980, p. ix.

16 Susan Pedersen, ‘Comparative history and women’s history:
explaining convergence and divergence’, in Deborah Cohen and
Maura O’Connor (eds), Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-
National Perspective, Routledge, 2004, p. 95.

17 Edward Said, Orientalism, 2nd edn, 1995, p. 354. Said’s views have
proved controversial. For a critique by a historian, see John M.
MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts, Manchester
University Press, 1995.

18 Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes,
Verso, 1998.

19 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, 1994.

20 Ibid.

21 Both these strands feature in a major work of the 1970s: John Iliffe,
The Modern History of Tanganyika, Cambridge University Press,
1979.

22 The present writer must be numbered among these naive fieldworkers.
See John Tosh, Clan Leaders and Colonial Chiefs in Lango, Oxford
University Press, 1978.

23 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial
India, Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 14-16.

24 Antoinette Burton (ed.). After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With
and Through the Nation, Duke University Press, 2003, editor’s
introduction, p. 3.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

25 Antoinette Burton, ‘Who needs the nation? Interrogating “British”
history’, in Catherine Hall (ed.), Cultures of Empire, Manchester
University Press, 2000.

26 Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?,
Routledge, 2004.

27 Catherine Hall, ‘Histories, empires and the post-colonial moment’,
in Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds), The Post-Colonial Question,
Routledge, 1996, p. 70.

28 Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary
Wollstonecraft to fames Kincaid, Columbia University Press, 1993,
pp. 8-33.

29 John Marriott, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in
the Colonial Imagination, Manchester University Press, 2003, ch. 6.

30 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: who
speaks for “Indian” pasts?’, Representations, XXXVII, 1992, pp. 1-3.

31 G.C. Spivak, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Patrick Williams and
Laura Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory:

A Reader, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993, pp. 94-104.

32 Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality’, p. 23.

33 Ashis Nandy, ‘History’s forgotten doubles’, History and Theory,
theme issue 34, 1995.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Memory and the spoken
word

History is both a form of memory and a discipline that draws on
memory as source material. Today some of the most productive
discussions about the nature of history are pursued in this area.
This chapter looks at the culture of commemoration before
examining in more depth the practice of oral history, in which
people are interviewed about their memories. Oral sources have
had a major impact on social history, and on the pre-colonial
history of Africa. Such material can give an exhilarating sense of
touching the ‘real’ past, but it is as full of pitfalls and difficulties
as any other sort of historical material. What questions should
historians ask of oral material, and what role do they themselves
play in its creation?

T his book ends where it began, with the relationship between
history and memory. In Chapter 1 1 pointed out that academic
history can be regarded as a form of memory, in that it provides
society with the best available record of past experience. But
that does not mean that no distinction should be made between
history and other forms of memory. ‘Social memory’, or ‘collective
memory’, refers to the stories and assumptions about the past that
illustrate - or account for - key features of the society we know
today. Out of the limitless stock of recoverable knowledge about
the past, social memory prioritizes material that validates cultural
values or political loyalties in the present, sometimes in the teeth
of the available evidence about the past. Academic history, on the
other hand, insists on two key principles; that the study of the past

304

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

should not simply mirror our own preoccupations, but should pay
special attention to what is different and remote from our experi-
ence; and that all historical interpretation should be rigorously
tested against the evidence. In short, both the standards and the
social role of the discipline of history depend on its standing apart
from social memory.

However these distinctions do not mean that other forms of
memory are of no consequence to historians. Historians today are
keenly interested in two forms of memory. Collective representa-
tions of the past as they circulate in popular culture are one focus
of interest. The other is the memories of individuals about their
own lifetime, often solicited by the historian. Each of these strikes
a different balance between authentic recall and the remodelling
of memory after the event. Each in different ways demonstrates
the immense cultural significance of the remembered past.

I

Collective memory

How a community - whether national or local - visualizes its past
conditions its understanding of society and its political conscious-
ness. All societies draw on memories that extend further back
than the lifetime of its present-day members. The more remote
past is not confined to history books and archives; it is present
also in popular consciousness, fed by a variety of commemora-
tive activities and recorded in a variety of media. These constitute
the social or collective memory of the society. Here the relation-
ship between past and present takes two complementary forms.
First, social memory usually gives at least partial access to what
happened in the past, and this historical knowledge conditions
popular understanding of the present. At the same time collective
memory is also a mirror of the present, reflecting its concerns in
time perspective, which means that it is subtly - sometimes not so
subtly - modified over time. Historians’ study of social memory
starts from the assumption that its content will diverge from their
professional understanding of the past, but that that very diver-
gence provides clues about the construction of popular memory.
If written history represents a selection of the past thought worthy
of recall, collective memory is an even more drastic simplification,
designed to reinforce a cultural identity or a potential for agency

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

305

in the present. As James Fentress and Chris Wickham put it,
‘social memory is not stable as information; it is stable, rather, at
the level of shared meanings and remembered images’. 1

The contribution of collective memory to social integration
is clearest in those pre-literate societies whose knowledge of the
past is wholly dependent on spoken narratives handed down
from one generation to the next. Although practically extinct
in highly industrialized countries, oral tradition is still a living
force in those countries where literacy has not yet displaced a
predominantly oral culture. Oral tradition conveys a strong aura
of cultural authenticity. But its historical significance can only be
fully grasped if it is treated as a secondary source, since there is
no direct link between the testimony and the event or experience
which it purports to recount.

In many African societies ethnic identity, social status, claims
to political office and rights in land are still validated by appeals
to oral tradition; what in Western society would be formalized
by written documents, in oral societies derives its authority from
the memories of the living. In the 1950s historians in Africa
began to evaluate oral tradition for its historical content and to
lay down procedures for its collection and interpretation. They
collected detailed bodies of tradition which by genealogical reck-
oning extended back four or five centuries, complete with named
individuals and their exploits - the very stuff of conventional
historiography. Their faith in the reliability of the traditions
was greatly strengthened by the discovery that in some of the
more centralized chiefdoms the transmission of tradition was the
business of trained specialists reciting fixed texts; in some socie-
ties material relics such as royal tombs or regalia were used as
mnemonic devices to ensure that the reigns of earlier rulers were
recalled in correct sequence. It was maintained that the methods
required to evaluate a formal oral tradition were in principle no
different from those required by written documents. 2 Oral tradi-
tion, it appeared, gave direct access to a hitherto unknown past
- and in an idiom untouched by Western literacy.

The role of oral tradition

Longer experience of oral tradition and reflection on the nature
of oral society soon showed that the position was not nearly so
straightforward. In particular, the analogy with written texts

mnemonic

An aid to memory.

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THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

kinship

Ties of blood, as between
parents and children, or
brothers and sisters.

affinity

Relationships through
marriage: thus one's in-
laws can be referred to as
'affines'.

broke down on the element of performance that characterizes
the transmission of oral tradition. Like story-tellers everywhere,
the performers of a tradition are alert to the atmosphere among
their audience and their sense of what is acceptable to them. Each
retelling of the story is likely to diverge from the one before, as the
content becomes subtly adjusted to social expectations. Traditions
are not kept alive by story-tellers who, by some mysterious faculty
beyond the grasp of literate people, are able to remember great
epics and lists without effort; they are handed down because they
hold meaning for the culture concerned.

Broadly speaking, oral traditions in Africa fulfil two social
functions. First, they teach the values and beliefs that are integral
to the culture - the proper relationship between humans and
animals, for example, or the obligations of kinship and affinity.
Second, they serve to validate the particular social and political
arrangements that currently prevail - the distribution of land, the
claims of one powerful lineage to the chiefship, or the pattern
of relations with a neighbouring people. By the time a tradition
has been handed down over four or five generations, its social
function is likely to have modified the content considerably, by
suppressing detail that no longer seems relevant, and by elabo-
rating the rhetorical or symbolic elements in the story. And this
process can continue indefinitely, as changes in social or political
circumstances leave their imprint on the corpus of oral tradition.
Sometimes these adjustments are made quite deliberately. Among
the Kuba people of the Congo a dynastic tradition could only be
recounted after its content had been carefully vetted in private by
a council of notables; as one of them put it, ‘After a while, the
truth of the old tales changed. What was true before, became false
afterwards’. 3

The sensitivity of oral tradition to the demands of its audi-
ence and the prestige of the written word was strikingly borne
out when the black American writer Alex Haley went to the
Gambia in 1966 in search of his slave-boy ancestor, Kunta Kinte.
Although the oral traditions current in the region do not contain
information about real people before the nineteenth century,
Haley duly found an elder who recited a tradition about the boy’s
capture into slavery by ‘the king’s soldiers’ in the mid-eighteenth
century. Haley had made no secret of his story and what he was
looking for, and there seems little doubt that the ‘tradition’ was
concocted for him. Several years later, as a result of the publicity

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

307

surrounding Haley’s best-selling book Roots (1976), many more
specialists in tradition were able to recite the story of Kunta Kinte
with further lively embellishments. 4

The interpretation of oral tradition

Using oral traditions for historical reconstruction therefore raises
major problems. Not only are they mostly narratives intended
for the edification of posterity - and thus rather low down in
the historian’s hierarchy of sources (see above, pp. 93-96); they
have also been constantly reworked to relate their meaning more
closely to the changing expectations of their audience. The result
is that historians are now very cautious about accepting the
veracity of oral tradition. On the other hand, the picture is by no
means uniformly negative. Criticisms of oral tradition have most
force when the researcher is confronted by a single body of tradi-
tion. But a cluster of related traditions opens the path to the kind
of comparative evaluation that historians are well accustomed to
practise in the case of written sources. When Jan Vansina tackled
the pre-colonial history of Rwanda he found a well-established
body of royal traditions which had been learned by heart in the
royal court and later published as the definitive account. It was
the recovery of a much wider cross-section of traditions that
enabled him to critique the official version and to reconstruct
the nineteenth-century history of the kingdom. 5 But the value
of oral tradition to the historian is not limited to retrospective
reconstruction. Its value is as much cultural as historical. In pre-
literate communities the remembered past is placed at the service
of the present. It resembles a canvas on which the political and
social values of the community are symbolically and succinctly
delineated.

Rwanda

The pre-colonial state
of Rwanda formed the
nucleus of the German
colony founded in the
1890s, and transferred to
Belgium in 1919. Since
independence in 1962,
the history of Rwanda
has been marked by strife
between the Hutu and
the Tutsi - the legacy of
divide-and-rule policies
pursued by the Belgians.

II

National and local memory

Oral culture in Africa may seem a world away from historical
consciousness in the West, but oral tradition has its place here
too. The difference is that oral transmission has to contend
with the authority and prevalence of both the written word and
visual culture (such as film and television). Hence it has become

308

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

customary to define ‘collective memory’ in a broader sense to
include not only what is recounted in oral narratives, but the com-
monly accepted versions of the past, whatever their provenance.
Consider, for example, the dominant collective memories of the
two World Wars in Britain. The First World War is remembered
as the ‘bad war’: an unrelieved tragedy in which a generation of
young men was led to futile slaughter, unredeemed by principled
motives. Conversely, the Second World War is cast as a heroic
epic, symbolized by Britain’s ‘finest hour’ in 1940 and Churchill’s
inspired leadership. While it is true that the stories told by vet-
erans have a special prestige, what chiefly sustains these memories
is the full resources of popular culture: the media, feature films,
documentaries, museums, war memorials and commemorative
parades (such as those on Remembrance Sunday). The cultural
significance of these memories of war is no less clear. They express
a view of not only what it meant to be British then, but what it
should mean to be British now, and for that reason they are imper-
vious to developments in historical scholarship. Thus no amount
of revisionism seems able to rehabilitate the First World War as
a struggle to preserve liberal democracy, or as a decisive victory
for British arms. As regards the Second World War, Britain’s
contribution to the allied victory continues to be inflated, while
the memory of Churchill remains untarnished by the mounting
evidence of his erratic and sometimes disastrous military leader-
ship. The fact that these views are so prevalent among the young
and middle-aged who did not actually experience either of the
wars demonstrates the moral power of collective memory. Its
true function is to provide lessons in the national interest and the
national character. 6

At the same time, it should not be assumed that everyone
subscribes to national memories of this kind. Class, locality and
religion can each generate memories that are sharply at variance
with the dominant public memory. In Catholic France at the
beginning of the eighteenth century the Protestant Camisards
rebelled against the royal army, fighting a guerilla war for two
years. That experience dominates the oral culture of the region to
this day, in re-tellings in family and village. The Camisard revolt is
not only the key event of collective memory, but the standard that
determines which subsequent events are worthy of recall. Local
tradition has little or nothing to say about the French Revolution
or the First World War; on the other hand the Resistance during

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

309

the Second World War was seen then as a reprise of Camisard
heroism, and its place in recent memory confirms that link. In
this instance collective memory has taken an oppositional form,
expressing the determination of a local group to retain its own
identity vis-a-vis the national culture. 7

Part of the reason why there is such an enduring and coherent
tradition among the Camisards is that the Cevennes, where
they live, is mountainous and inaccessible. Until recently there
was comparatively free transmission between generations, and
the region was thrown on its own cultural resources. In most
parts of the Western world those conditions have long ceased
to apply. Countries like Britain now experience high levels of
spatial mobility and also the intrusive power of the commercial-
ized media. Less authority is accorded to the elderly, and their
renditions of the past are of less interest to the young. The place
of oral tradition in collective memory has been steadily declining,
and consequently it has become much less rewarding as a focus
of research. Instead the emphasis in memory studies is tending to
shift to other indicators of historical consciousness.

Anniversaries and collective memory

One aspect of this shift is commemorative ritual. Most coun-
tries celebrate a national day which falls on the anniversary of
a formative or symbolic event in the nation’s history. In France
the celebration of 14 July (Bastille Day) sums up the process
whereby the French Revolution has over the last century become
central to the national self-image. In Serbia even greater weight
is given to 28 June - the day when the medieval empire of Serbia
was crushed by the Ottoman Turks at Kosovo Polje in 1389.
Symbolically that battle exemplifies the Serb self-image as a brave
but beleaguered people; and because Kosovo lies to the south of
the present Serbian heartland, the anniversary has the potential to
stoke the fires of Serb territorial expansion, as happened during
the wars that destroyed Yugoslavia during the 1990s. 8 ‘Kosovo’
is an article of faith, expressing a sacramental view of the past.
Even without such a strong nationalist ideology, anniversaries
starkly express the principles of political selection that underpin
collective memory.

In this respect Britain is unusual. There is no national day,
and none for England either (though there are days for Scotland

3 1 0

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

France's national day is
14 July. The parades
held all over France
commemorate the
storming of the Bastille,
which began the French
Revolution in 1789. It
has become a common
symbol acceptable to all
French people, except
monarchists.

(Getty Images/AFP)

and Wales). Anniversaries that were observed in the past, like the
Glorious Revolution of 1688 or the accession of Queen Victoria,
have withered away. The main one that survives has also shed
its historical and ideological associations. Bonfire Night on
5 November commemorates the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when
the arrest of the Catholic conspirator, Guy Fawkes, delivered
James I and his Parliament in the nick of time. Barely had the
conspirators been tried and executed than Parliament ordained
that the anniversary should be marked by church services in
every parish. Popular participation was based on gratitude for
the mercy of Divine Providence, and a consuming hatred for
Catholics, whether at home or abroad. But by the mid-nineteenth
century anti-Catholic prejudice was a shadow of its former self,
and the statutory service of thanksgiving was dropped in 1859.
Bonfire Night today lacks any historical referent at all, and no
one any longer supposes that it is a national day. It has become
symbolically impoverished, except perhaps in marking the onset
of winter - though one might add that it also bears witness to the
comparative indifference of the English to formal invocations of
their national history. 9

Memories in stone

Public commemoration also takes the more material form of
monuments and statues. Most capital cities feature many such
reminders of the past, usually selected as a contribution to
national pride. In London the most prominent examples are
the Queen Victoria monument outside Buckingham Palace, and
Trafalgar Square which is dedicated to military and naval heroes.
Unlike oral tradition, these are ‘frozen’ memories, relatively
resistant to reinterpretation. Statues and the like usually attract
considerable public attention when they are unveiled, but they
seldom convey much information. Continuing public recognition
depends on the posthumous standing of the honorand. However,
most monuments in stone are little more than prompters; their
role is not so much to create memory as to remind the viewer of
events or persons which he or she knows about already. Indeed
the point may be reached when neither the name nor the image
registers with the public mind at all. Such was the fate of Sir
Henry Havelock, the general lionized for his role in suppressing
the Indian rebellion of 1857 and commemorated by a statue in

honorand

Recipient of an honour or
distinction (in this case
commemoration).

Sir Henry Havelock's most
celebrated exploit was
the relief of the British
community in Lucknow,
during the Indian rebellion
of 1857. He died of
fever shortly afterwards.
Havelock was acclaimed
a hero on all sides, and
was commemorated by a
statue in Trafalgar Square.
(Getty Images/Hulton
Archive)

3 1 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Trafalgar Square (and by street names all over England). As part
of a debate about replanning the square in 2001, the Mayor of
London, Ken Livingstone, declared Havelock to be a completely
obscure individual who no longer merited a statue. Although
removal of the statue was regarded as a somewhat draconian
course, there is little doubt that Livingstone, in expressing his
ignorance of Havelock, spoke for the overwhelming majority of
Londoners. The same fate has overcome many other worthies
who were names to conjure with in their own day.

But the prevalence of monuments not only raises questions
about the after-life of those commemorated; it also throws into
relief the commemorative impulse itself. The commissioning and
siting of so many monuments suggests a society in which collec-
tive memory can no longer be taken for granted. As an integral
aspect of culture it has been eroded or displaced, and it must
now be artificially promoted if it is to survive at all. What has
displaced memory is history itself: the critical, evidence-based
study of the past, which is not tied to any political agenda. That
at least is the influential thesis of Pierre Nora: history ‘is how
modern societies organize a past they are condemned to forget
because they are driven by change’; history, he goes on, is deeply
hostile to memory, which in its traditional form is ‘all-powerful,
sweeping, un-self-conscious, and inherently present-minded’. 10
Nora overplays the antithesis for rhetorical effect. More of a
memory culture survives in modern societies than he allows, while
historians are by no means innocent of selecting and moulding
their work for political effect. Nevertheless Nora is right that
memory in modern societies is not spontaneous, but managed:
commemoration is focused on events or people that have either
passed out of memory altogether, or are only dimly perceived.
And Nora shows how his own country - Lrance - has been sub-
jected to relentless memorialization for over a hundred years:
the contributors to his magnum opus analyse some 130 ‘sites of
memory’ (lieux de memoire ), expressing a variety of cultural and
political goals, but all of them dedicated to an idea of Lrance. 11

In such societies collective memory cannot be regarded as part
of the authentic culture of ordinary people. Elements of sponta-
neous oral transmission certainly survive, but they are inextricably
combined with readings of the past that have been promoted
for political ends, and with residues of the past that have been
deliberately preserved. Yet, whether inwardly grown or absorbed

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

3 1 3

from a hegemonic culture, popular historical consciousness is an
important ingredient of political and cultural history. Much more
research is needed to tease out the relations between these dif-
ferent elements. The signs are that the task will be pursued with
some vigour; for, in prioritizing the study of representation and
meaning, the study of collective memory is fully in tune with the
cultural turn; indeed it is an integral part of it.

Ill

First-hand memories

In the study of collective memory, individual voices are often lost
sight of, because the past is not the property of the individual
but a community possession. The position is quite different with
regard to first-hand reminiscence. Though hardly independent of
cultural influences, personal testimony is centred on the experi-
ence and opinions of the individual informant, often recounted
with vividness of detail and an emotional power.

In the late 1960s historians began to develop a methodology
for recording and interpreting evidence about the past acquired
from interview. Given the close association of historical scholar-
ship with archival research, this was a significant novelty. For
many historians, especially those on the Left, it was a breath of
fresh air which enabled them to reconstruct the lives of ordinary
people in their own words, instead of relying on the official record
and the observations of elite writers. The new technique became
known as oral history. It is valued for two different reasons. First,
it can bring the past vividly to life, providing authentic evidence
of popular experience fifty or sixty years ago: for example, the
discipline of the schoolroom or the impact of industrial strife on
working-class communities. Here oral evidence is treated as a
primary source analogous to the documentary record, enjoying
the same privileged status. But closer examination often reveals
that the testimony of informants - especially elderly informants
- departs from the known record by omission or by the incorpo-
ration of extraneous elements. What they remember from several
decades back is modified by the impact of subsequent experience
and the recollections of other people. This is the second reason
why oral material is now so closely studied. Like collective
memory transmitted over the generations, it provides precious

3 1 4

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

evidence of how the past continues to evolve in the minds of
the living.

Herodotus (c.485-425

bce)

Generally regarded as
'the father of history'.

He travelled widely
throughout the Greek-
speaking world and relied
extensively on local
informants.

Thucydides (c.460-400

bce)

Athenian historian who
wrote principally about
the Peloponnesian
War between Athens
and Sparta. He, too,
relied on informants.

He is renowned for his
dispassionate impartiality.

The pedigree of oral history

It is only very recently that professional historians have acquired
any experience of collecting oral sources. Even today the main-
stream of the historical profession remains sceptical and is often
not prepared to enter into discussion about the actual merits and
drawbacks of oral research. Arthur Marwick gave it short shrift
in The New Nature of History (2001). Yet oral sources provided
the bulk of the evidence used by those who are now revered as the
first historians - Herodotus and Thucydides. The chroniclers and
historians of the Middle Ages were hardly less dependent on oral
testimony; and although written sources grew rapidly in impor-
tance from the Renaissance onwards, the older techniques still
survived as a valued adjunct to documentary research. It was only
with the emergence of modern academic history in the nineteenth
century that the use of oral sources was entirely abandoned. The
energies of the new professional historians were taken up by the
study of written documents, on which their claim to technical
expertise was based, and their working lives were largely confined
to the library and the archive. The French historian Jules Michelet
was highly unusual in saluting the memories of the common
people as ‘living documents’. 12

Ironically, many of the written sources cited by today’s histo-
rians were themselves oral in origin. Social surveys and official
commissions of enquiry, which loom so large in the primary
sources for nineteenth-century social history, are full of summa-
rized testimonies; historians routinely draw on them, often with
little regard for the selection of witnesses or the circumstances in
which they were interviewed. Yet the idea that historians might
add to the volume of oral evidence by conducting interviews
themselves continues to arouse misgivings. The reason is partly
that historians are reluctant to see any compromise with the prin-
ciple that contemporaneity is the prime requirement of historical
sources - and oral sources have an inescapable element of hind-
sight about them. Perhaps too there is a reluctance to grapple with
the implications of scholars sharing in the creation (and not just
the interpretation) of new evidence.

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

3 1 5

The need for oral history

The fact that oral techniques have made any headway at all among
professional historians is due almost entirely to the reticence of
conventional written sources on a number of areas that are now
engaging scholarly attention. Recent political history is one such
topic. Whereas in the Victorian and Edwardian periods public
figures commonly conducted a voluminous official and private
correspondence, their modern counterparts rely much more on
the telephone and e-mail, and when they do write letters they
seldom have the leisure to write at length. There have been major
public figures in recent times who have left no private papers to
speak of - for example Herbert Morrison, a leading member of
the Labour Party in the 1930s and 1940s. 13 In order to fill out the
evidence to the proportions appropriate to a biography, histo-
rians have had to collect the impressions and recollections of such
figures from their surviving colleagues and associates. The second
area concerns what might be termed the recent social history of
everyday life, and particularly those aspects of working-class life
in the family and the workplace that were seldom the subject of
contemporary observation or enquiry. In Britain the oral history
movement is dominated by social historians whose interest in
these topics is in many cases sustained by an active socialist
commitment, evident in their house journal, Oral History. Oral
historians are also acutely conscious of their obligation to make
their material available to other scholars; recordings and tran-
scripts are usually placed on public deposit, for example in the
British Library Sound Archive.

IV

The voice of the people?

When I came to this village with my father, I was in lodgings as well,
so there were no real home comforts to come back to after the pit. I
remember being in one set of lodgings: there were six or seven other
miners lodging there. It was only a house with three bedrooms, so
you can imagine that we were sleeping on a rota basis.

If five or six of us were on the same shift, as soon as I got out of
the pit I’d gallop home to be the first to have a bath. There were no
bathrooms: all you had was an old zinc tub, and the landlady would
have a couple of buckets of water on the fire. If there were five or
six of you together, first of all five of you would bath the top half of

Herbert Morrison
( 1 885 - 1 965 )

Labour politician. He
was a major figure in the
development of London
between the wars,
especially the capital's
public transport network.
He served in Ramsay
MacDonald's 1929 Labour
government, and as Home
Secretary in Churchill's
wartime coalition. He was
Deputy Prime Minister in
Clement Attlee's postwar
Labour government
and was in charge of
steering the programme
of nationalization through
the House of Commons.

He was the grandfather of
the Blairite New Labour
minister, Peter Mandelson.

3 1 6

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

the body. Everybody bathed the top half of the body in a rota, and
then you stepped back into the bath and washed the bottom part of
your body. What used to amuse me in those days - well, not amuse
- what used to embarrass me was that you’d get the women from
next door or from each side of the terraced house. They’d come in
there, and they’d sit down in the kitchen, and they wouldn’t bloody
move - when even you were washing the bottom part of your body.
As a youngster and not being used to that, I was not only shy but
embarrassed, because you learnt the differences even in those days
between the sexes . 14

This narrative, collected from a retired collier in South Wales as
part of a research project on the history of mining communities,
conveys something of the qualities that recommend oral history
to historians. It is a fragment of autobiography by someone
who would never otherwise have dreamed of dignifying his
reminiscences in that way. As an individual experience that is
commonplace and yet at the same time particular, it offers a vivid
insight into a way of life that now survives in Britain only in the
memories of the very old. Contemporary written sources for the
Edwardian period - the reports of social investigators and chari-
table bodies, for example - provide copious information about
the homes of the poor, but it is information derived at second
hand and glossed by ‘expert’ opinion, a description from outside
rather than a product of experience. Oral history allows the voice
of ordinary people to be heard alongside the careful marshalling
of social facts in the written record.

The testimony that can be gleaned from informants, like the
memories of most old people about their youth, is often confused
as regards specific events and the sequence in which they occurred.
Where it is most reliable is in characterizing recurrent experience,
like the practice of a working skill or a child’s involvement in a
network of neighbours and kin. The routines of daily life and the
fabric of ordinary social relationships were commonplace and
therefore taken for granted at the time, but now they seem of
compelling human interest, and oral enquiry offers the readiest
means of access - as in A Woman’s Place (1984), Elizabeth
Roberts’s fine study of Lancashire working-class women, based
on nearly 160 interviews. What oral history also uniquely conveys
is the essential connectedness of aspects of daily life which the
historian otherwise tends to know of as discrete social facts.
Through the life histories of the very poor, for instance, the way

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

3 1 7

in which casual labour, periodic destitution, under-nourishment,
drunkenness, truancy and familial violence formed a total social
environment for thousands of people before the First World War
(and later) can be vividly portrayed. Oral history, in short, gives
social history a human face.

Oral history and local history

How do oral historians come by their informants? The sampling
techniques of sociology have had some influence here. In a classic
early attempt to incorporate the findings of oral history into
a general social history, Paul Thompson took a carefully con-
structed sample of 500 surviving Edwardians from all classes and
regions of Britain, and some of the resulting material is presented
in his book, The Edwardians (1975). 15 But few historians have
followed his example. Most recent oral history has been emphati-
cally local in focus, and for this there are sound practical reasons.
In a strictly local study all the elderly who are willing and able can
be canvassed; less trust has to be placed in the reliability of the
individual informant since the testimonies can be tested against
each other; and the purely local references which always feature
prominently in life histories can be elucidated with the help of
other source materials. But it is also significant that oral history
has from the outset been practised by amateur local historians.
The English tradition of amateur local history (which extends
back to the sixteenth century) has stressed topography and the
world of the squire, parson and - more rarely - businessman.
Oral history promises a sense of place and community accessible
to ordinary people, while at the same time illuminating broader
features of social history. Very fine work of this kind has been
done under the auspices of the History Workshop movement.
Raphael Samuel reconstructed the economic and social milieu of
Headington Quarry near Oxford before it was enveloped by the
expansion of the motor industry in the 1920s; without the rich
oral testimony he collected, Samuel would have found it difficult
to penetrate far beyond the stereotype of ‘Quarry roughs’ in news-
papers of the time to understand the range of trades and social
networks that sustained the independent spirit of the villagers. 16
In the field of urban local history, perhaps the best oral work has
been the two London studies by Jerry White, an accomplished
amateur: one on a notorious Holloway street between the World

topography

The study of the physical
features of a location.

squire

The general term used for
a member of the gentry,
the major landowner in
a particular village. The
term is usually reserved for
those whose influence was
limited to one particular
locality, as opposed to
nobles and aristocrats,
whose landholdings might
be very extensive.

3 1 8

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

The collection of oral
testimony about Campbell

Road in Holloway belied Wars (Campbell Road), the other about a single tenement block
its reputation as 'the worst j n j^g £ ast £ nc [ arounc | the turn of the century . 17
street in London'.

(Topfoto/J White)

The authentic past?

Underlying the practice of oral history are two powerfully
attractive assumptions. First - and most obviously - personal
reminiscence is viewed as an effective instrument for re-creating
the past - the authentic testimony of human life as it was actu-
ally experienced. Paul Thompson revealingly entitles his book
on the methods and achievements of oral history The Voice of
the Past , and - notwithstanding all the reservations made in the
text - the notion of a direct encounter between historians and
their subject matter is central to Thompson’s outlook . 18 At one
level, therefore, oral history simply represents a novel means of
fulfilling the programme laid down by professional historians
since the early nineteenth century - ‘to show how things actually

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

3 1 9

were’ and to enter into the experience of people in the past as fully
as possible. But many oral historians are not content with being
grist to the mills of professional history. They see oral history
rather as a democratic alternative, challenging the monopoly of
an academic elite. Ordinary people are offered not only a place
in history, but a role in the production of historical knowledge
with important political implications. In east London during
the 1970s the People’s Autobiography of Hackney was an open
group of local residents who recorded each other’s life histories
and published the transcriptions in pamphlets marketed through
a local bookshop. Although educated people participated, no aca-
demic historians were involved; if they had been, the confidence
of people in their own perceptions of the past might have been
undermined. The idea was that through oral work the community
should discover its own history and develop its social identity,
free from the patronizing assumptions of conventional historical
wisdom. Ken Worpole, coordinator of the group, recalls the
circumstances in which it began in the early 1970s: ‘producing
shareable and common history from the spoken reminiscences
of working-class people seemed a positive and important activity
to integrate with various other new forms of “community” poli-
tics’. 19 Local projects in oral history have served the interests of
many other groups, variously based on class and ethnicity.

V

The pitfalls of oral history

However, both these formulations - oral history as ‘re-creation’
and as ‘democratic’ knowledge - are problematic. The role of the
professional historian itself makes for difficulties. It is naive to
suppose that the testimony represents a pure distillation of past
experience, for in an interview each party is affected by the other.
It is the historian who selects the informant and indicates the area
of interest; and even if he or she asks no questions and merely
listens, the presence of an outsider affects the atmosphere in which
the informant recalls the past. The end-product is conditioned
both by the historian’s social position vis-a-vis the informant, and
by the terms in which he or she has learnt to analyse the past and
which may well be communicated to the informant. In the phrase
made popular by the American oral scholar Michael Frisch, histo-
rian and informants exercise a ‘shared authority’. 20

320

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Historians have learned
the techniques required
to get hold of the oral
testimony of witnesses to
the past. But how much
care is needed in dealing
with first-hand accounts
that are inevitably
influenced by hindsight?
(Topfoto/lmage Works)

But the difficulties are far from over when the historian is
removed from the scene. For not even the informant is in direct
touch with the past. His or her memories, however precise and
vivid, are filtered through subsequent experience. They may be
contaminated by what has been absorbed from other sources
(especially the media); they may be overlaid by nostalgia (‘times
were good then’), or distorted by a sense of grievance about dep-
rivation in childhood which took root only in later life. To anyone
listening, the feelings and attitudes - say of affection towards a
parent or distrust of union officials - are often what lend convic-
tion to the testimony, yet they may be the emotional residue of
later experience rather than the period in question. As one critic
of Paul Thompson’s work put it:

Edwardian

Relating to the reign
of King Edward VII
( 1 901 - 10 ).

His ‘Edwardians’ after all, have lived on to become ‘Georgians’ and,
now, ‘Elizabethans’. Over the years, certain memories have faded,
or, at very least, may have been influenced by subsequent experience.
How many of their childhood recollections were, in fact, recalled to
them by their own elders? What autobiographies or novels might
they have since read that would reinforce certain impressions at the
expense of others? What films or television programmes have had an
impact on their consciousness? ... to what extent might the rise of

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

3 2 1

the Labour Party in the post-war decade have inspired retrospective
perception of class status and conflict ? 21

Whatever the evidence it rests on, the notion of a direct encounter
with the past is an illusion, but perhaps nowhere more than in
the case of testimony from hindsight. ‘The voice of the past’ is
inescapably the voice of the present too.

The limitations of oral history

Yet even supposing that oral evidence were somehow authentic
and unalloyed, it would still be inadequate as a representation of
the past. For historical reality comprises more than the sum of
individual experiences. It is no disparagement of the individual to
say that our lives are largely spent in situations that, from our sub-
jective perspective, we cannot fully understand. How we perceive
the world around us may or may not amount to a viable basis for
living, but it never corresponds to reality in its entirety. One of
the historian’s functions is to investigate the deeper structures and
processes that were at work in the lives of individuals. The vivid-
ness of personal recall which is the strength of oral evidence also
therefore points to its principal limitation, and historians need to
be wary about becoming trapped within the mental categories of
their informants. In the words of Philip Abrams:

The close encounter may make the voices louder; it does not . . . make
their meaning clearer. To that end we must turn back from ‘their’
meanings to our own and to the things we know about them which
they did not know, or say, about themselves . 22

This limitation applies with particular force to the democratic or
populist tendency in oral history. The idea behind projects of the
‘people’s autobiography’ type is that an articulate and authentic
historical consciousness will enable ordinary working people
to take more control over their lives. But to do so they need an
understanding of the forces that have actually moulded their
world - most of them not of their making or directly manifest in
their experience. The problem with collective oral history is that
it may reinforce the superficial way in which most people think
of the changes they have lived through, instead of equipping them
with deeper insights as a basis for more effective political action.

Georgian

Here, relating to the
reign of King George V
0910-36). The term is
more usually used of the
reigns of the first four
Georges 0714-1930); it
was only rarely used to
refer to George V, and
then usually in conjunction
with 'Georgian' painters
and writers.

Elizabethan

Although usually used to
refer to the first Queen
Elizabeth, it here refers to
Queen Elizabeth II. There
was a vogue at the start of
her reign in 1952 to speak
of a 'New Elizabethan
Age', though the term was
not current for long.

3 2 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Interpreting oral history

What place, then, does oral history have in the practice of
historians? The problems raised here are not grounds for having
nothing to do with oral history. What they suggest is rather that
oral evidence, like all verbal materials, requires critical evalua-
tion, and that it must be deployed in conjunction with all the
other available sources; in other words, the canons of historical
method described in Chapter 5 apply here too. Transcriptions
of testimonies are not ‘history’, but raw material for the writing
of history. They are no substitute for the work of historical
interpretation.

Oral sources are in fact extremely demanding of the historian’s
skills. If the full significance of an oral testimony is to come across,
it must be evaluated in conjunction with all the sources pertaining
to the locality and people spoken of, or else much of the detail will
count for nothing. Sometimes oral research itself unearths new
documentary material in private hands - family accounts or old
photographs - which add to the amount of supporting evidence.
Jerry White describes his book on tenement life in London’s East
End, Rothschild Buildings (1980), in these terms:

This may be primarily a work of oral history but documents have
played a large part in its conception. Written sources and oral
sources interact throughout: finding a new document has led me
to ask different questions of the people I interviewed, and the oral
testimony has thrown fresh light on the documents. The rules printed
on the first tenants’ rentbooks led me to ask if they were obeyed and
how; finding the original plans of the Buildings made me wonder
what was kept in the fitted cupboard behind the living-room door;
people’s memories of shopping led me to take street directories with
a large pinch of salt; autobiographical details cast doubts on census
classifications, sociologists’ assumptions and standard historical
reference works, and so on . 23

Command of the full range of relevant sources is no less important
for ‘democratic’ oral history. The more traditional inventory of
local historians’ sources - business archives, newspapers, census
returns, the reports of charitable bodies, etc. - provides an entry
into the economic and social context of the informants’ lives and
may reveal something of the historical processes that have shaped
the observable changes in the locality. The limitations inherent in
the amateur group project mean that, to be politically effective, it
requires the participation, if not of professional historians, at least

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

3 2 3

of people familiar with the methods and findings of mainstream
social history. 24

VI

Oral history as cultural memory

However there is an important sense in which the anxiety about
the accuracy of oral testimony is beside the point. For first-hand
reminiscence invites a cultural analysis comparable to the perspec-
tive described earlier for collective memory in a more extended
sense. Oral history may be less important as histoire verite than as
indispensable evidence of how the past lives in the consciousness
of the present. From this perspective informants are offering not
so much private knowledge of the everyday as pointers to more
deep-seated values and sentiments. In the case of recent public
events, oral testimony is not likely to supplant or add to the
written record. What it demonstrates is how those events became
lodged in popular consciousness, and how their significance has
been modified over a lifetime. The sense of the past that individuals
carry around with them comprises a selection of their immediate
experience, together with some conception of the nature of the
social order in which they live. Historical biographies sometimes
show how these two elements bear on each other in the thinking
of leaders and intellectuals, but we know much less about their
place in the historical awareness of ordinary people. Yet the way
in which social groups assimilate and interpret their political
experience is a historical factor in its own right, at the heart of
political culture. From this perspective, the mental transition from
‘Edwardians’ to ‘Georgians’ and on to ‘Elizabethans’ is an object
of study for its own sake, instead of being merely an obstruction
in the way of a direct encounter with the past.

The memories of individuals are even more susceptible to
reworking when they bear on public events of great moment.
National morale dictates that war memories should be of a
particular kind, while the collective experience of both civilians
and soldiers predisposes people to conform to the accepted nar-
ratives. The twentieth-century history of Australia provides a
classic instance. The participation of Anzac troops in the Gallipoli
campaign of 1915 is central to the modern sense of Australian
nationhood, and has been officially promoted as such since

histoire verite

(French) Truth history',
derived from the phrase
cinema verite, a style
of film pioneered by
French directors, which
attempted to show gritty
and unpolished 'reality'
rather than the carefully
composed images of
conventional cinema.

Anzac

Properly, ANZAC:
Australian and New
Zealand Army Corps.

Anzac troops were
involved in the disastrous
allied landings at Gallipoli
in Turkey during the First
World War, where their
heavy casualties sowed
much bitterness towards
the British planners of the
operation.

Gallipoli

The amphibious landing
of allied troops in 1 91 5 at
the town of Gallipoli, on
the narrow Dardanelles
strait in western Turkey,
was one of the most
disastrous allied operations
of the First World War.

The plan, proposed by
Winston Churchill as First
Lord of the Admiralty,
was bold in conception
but poorly planned and
executed, and resulted
in very heavy casualties.
The troops had to be
evacuated, never having
been able to advance
inland from the landing
beaches.

324

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty
Organization. It is an
American-led military
alliance of the Western
powers created in 1949
and aimed at containing
and counterbalancing the
threat from the Soviet
Union and its allies, which
responded the following
year by forming their
own alliance structure,
the Warsaw Pact.
Adherence to NATO was
controversial with those
who sympathized with the
Soviet Union in the Cold
War, or who distrusted
the increasing reliance
on military alliances and
atomic weaponry.

the 1920s. Alistair Thomson conducted interviews of surviving
Anzacs during the 1980s. His book, Anzac Memories: Living
with the Legend (1994), shows how men who had experienced
fear, trauma and a sense of inadequacy in combat suppressed
their personal memories so as to match the accepted picture of
loyalty, bravery and camaraderie on the front line, which most
Australians accept to this day. In other words, memory and its
articulation in reminiscence produced a standardized narrative
which for several decades has served to underpin Australia’s sense
of nationhood.

The politics of oral history are manifest as much in what
is forgotten as what is remembered. Given the limited capacity
which most people have for remembering the past, this is hardly
surprising; but the suppression also answers to political need.
Researching how workers in the city of Turin remembered the
Fascist period, Luisa Passerini was struck how they recalled the
Fascist takeover in 1922-3 and the regime’s collapse in 1943, but
not the intervening two decades when Mussolini was firmly in
the saddle: such was the force of the popular impulse to suppress
the record of collusion during the period of dictatorship. 25 In
another Italian example, Alessandro Portelli demonstrates how
quickly crucial details can be substituted in deference to changing
political priorities. Luigi Trastulli was a steel-worker killed by
police during a demonstration in the Italian town of Terni in
1949. This event administered such a shock to the workers that
very soon appropriate causes and circumstances were being
improvised to render it explicable. Whereas Trastulli had been
killed during a protest against Italian entry into NATO, many
of the memories current during the 1970s relocated the event as
part of a later demonstration against the mass lay-off of workers,
a much more critical issue for most of the participants. Trastulli
was also portrayed as having been pinned against the factory
wall by police fire, in an image that emphasized his status as a
martyr. In research of this kind the point is not to peel away the
accretions and distortions until the kernel of truth is exposed. As
Portelli explains,

the discrepancy between fact and memory ultimately enhances the
value of the oral sources as historical documents. It is not caused
by faulty recollections . . . but actively and creatively generated by
memory and imagination in an effort to make sense of crucial events
and of history in general . 26

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

3 2 5

Recent commentators have identified a widespread ‘memory boom’
or a ‘memorial culture’, in which individuals seek a personal link
with the public past, through genealogy, military records, old
photographs, and so on. 27 The demand for such a link has most
political bite in the arena of identity politics. Subordinated groups
often have a perspective on the recent past that is at variance with
the approved national version and which is jealously preserved as
a badge of group consciousness. The black residents of Brixton,
Toxteth and Tottenham do not recall the riots that occurred there
in the 1980s in the same terms as does ‘received opinion’ in the
nation at large. The more politically conscious the community is,
the greater the need to make sense of the past in ways that are
politically enabling. The conflict of memories is sharpest when the
past is not yet ‘over’ - when the grievances and tensions that col-
lective memory recounts are still alive today. Graham Dawson’s
study of popular memory in Northern Ireland shows that, despite
more than ten years’ of truce since the Good Friday Agreement,
the communities are almost as divided in their sense of the recent
past as they have ever been. 28

The use of oral evidence by historians began as a means of
restoring the particularities of human experience to their central
place in historical discourse. A technique that owes its modern
development to sociology and anthropology has been enlisted
in support of an enterprise foreign to the generalizing, theory-
oriented nature of those disciplines. In fact the practice of oral
history has had more to do with the re-creational than the
explanatory side of historical enquiry. Like other academic
innovators, oral historians have tended in the past to advance
exaggerated claims for their expertise, maintaining that they are
uniquely - perhaps exclusively - qualified to recover ‘lost’ areas
of human experience. The contribution of oral sources in these
areas can hardly be denied. What cannot be sustained, however,
is the notion that the historian, by listening to ‘the voice of the
past’, can re-create these neglected strands of history with an
authentic immediacy. No less than documentary sources, oral
sources demand critical analysis and a sensitivity to their cultural
and social context. Submitted to that discipline, what oral history
reveals is a unique insight into the formation of popular historical
consciousness - something that should be of abiding interest
to all historians.

Good Friday Agreement

After nearly thirty years
of 'the Troubles', an
agreement was made
in April 1998 between
the political parties of
Northern Ireland and the
governments of Britain
and the Irish Republic. As
a result, inter-communal
violence in the province
was scaled down, British
troops were withdrawn
from the streets, and
devolved self-government
was restored.

3 26

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

VII

The place of recorded reminiscence in historical enquiry is not best
served by calling it ‘oral history’, which suggests a new specialism
analogous to diplomatic or economic history. Oral history is not
a new branch of history but a new technique. But it is nevertheless
central to a new kind of historical enquiry - the study of memory.
And the reason why memory is attracting so much attention is
not that it represents one more topic to be historicized along with
all the others, but because it is fundamental to understanding
people’s relationship with the past. That relationship is anything
but simple. Individual recall has to be weighed against collective
memory; spontaneous memory against manipulated memory;
national against local tradition. We saw how the social function
of oral tradition is particularly clear in pre-literate societies. Print
culture and urbanization complicate the picture, but they do not
alter its essentials. In all societies collective memory is both the
survival of past experience and an imposition by the requirements
of the present on that past. It is the implications of that paradox
that account for the fascination of memory studies in history.

Two final observations suggest a more penetrating explanation
of the attention which historians are now giving to memory. First,
if the vogue for Postmodernism has undermined the truth claims
of conventional academic history (see Chapter 7), the study of
memory may appeal precisely because it deals with impressions and
constructions rather than addressing matters of fact. Historians
who wish to be in tune with the prevalent epistemology carry much
more conviction if their scholarship no longer turns on evidential
proof. 29 Second, the academic history of memory has grown up
alongside a burgeoning memory culture in society at large, cov-
ering such varied themes as family history, industrial archaeology,
and the attention given to the minutiae of royal history. Raphael
Samuel regarded these popular manifestations of memory as more
vital and more rewarding than most of the output of professionally
blinkered academics. 30 Indeed some historians detect a crisis of
authority, as historians vie with the lay popular culture of memory
for attention. 31 To speak of a struggle for survival overstates the
case, but both the challenge of Postmodernism and the alleged
crisis of authority remind us that memory is integral to culture,
and that the contribution that historians make to its understanding
cannot be abstracted from the wider intellectual setting.

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

3 2 7

Gathering oral history

As oral history has grown in popularity so historians have become
more sophisticated in how they set about collecting reminiscences.
Museums and archives specializing in the history of the twentieth
century (for example the Imperial War Museum) often invest
in the gathering of oral memory interviews while potential
interviewees are still alive. Television history has long made
use of oral history interviews, often with figures who played a
leading role in important events of twentieth-century history. Such
important first-hand testimony can be invaluable, but it needs to
be treated with caution: interviewees can be wanting to get ‘their’
version of events on record.

Oral history societies publish handbooks to give advice to
novices in the field. The oral history researcher needs to bear
in mind that interviewees may be very elderly and frail, and
unable to take being interviewed for any lengthy session. Few
interviewees can launch immediately into detailed reminiscence
about events they might not have thought about for years.
Historians have learned the value of approaching the main theme
of the research carefully, sometimes providing artefacts or music
from the period to help to trigger the memory. Memory itself has
to be treated with great caution. It can be remarkably clear, even
after a very long time; on the other hand, memory can play tricks,
and what seem to be firm and detailed memories can be disproved
by other evidence.

Further reading

Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory, Manchester University Press,
2007.

James Fentress & Chris Wickham, Social Memory, Blackwell, 1992.

Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de memoire’.
Representations, XXVI, 1989.

Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, James Currey, 1985.

David Henige, Oral Historiography, Longman, 1982.

Paul Thompson, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 3rd edn, Oxford
University Press, 2000.

Robert Perks & Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History Reader, 2nd
edn, Routledge, 2006.

328

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Sherna B. Gluck & Daphne Patai (eds), 'Women’s Words: The Feminist
Practice of Oral History, Routledge, 1991.

Raphael Samuel & Paul Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By,
Routledge, 1990.

Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories:
Form and Meaning in Oral History, SUNY Press, 1991.

Notes

1 James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory, Blackwell, 1992,
p. 59.

2 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology,
trans. H.M. Wright, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.

3 Jan Vansina, The Children of Woot, Wisconsin University Press,

1978, p. 19.

4 Donald R. Wright, ‘Uprooting Kunta Kinte: on the perils of relying
on encyclopaedic informants’, History in Africa, VIII, 1981.

5 Jan Vansina, Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya
Kingdom, Wisconsin University Press, 2004.

6 Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory, Hambledon
Continuum, 2005; Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth
and Popular Memory, Routledge, 2000.

7 Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, pp. 92-6.

8 Tim Judah, The Serbs: A History, Yale University Press, 1997,
pp. 29-47, 164.

9 James Sharpe, Remember, Remember the Fifth of November: Guy
Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, Profile, 2005.

10 Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les Lieux de memoire’,
Representations, XXVI, 1989, pp. 7-9.

11 Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de memoire, 7 vols, Gallimard, 1984-92.

12 Jules Michelet, Le Peuple, 1846, quoted in Paul Thompson, The
Voice of the Past: Oral History, Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 40.

13 Bernard Donoughue and G.W. Jones, Herbert Morrison, Weidenfeld
&c Nicolson, 1973.

14 Christopher Storm-Clark, ‘The miners, 1870-1970: a test-case for
oral history’, Victorian Studies, XV, 1971, pp. 65-6.

15 Thompson describes his sampling procedure more fully in his
methodological work, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 2nd edn,
Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 124-31.

16 Raphael Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour, Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1975.

MEMORY AND THE SPOKEN WORD

329

17 Jerry White, The Worst Street in North London: Campbell Bunk,
Islington, Between the Wars, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986, and
Rothschild Buildings: Life in an East End Tenement Block, 1887-
1920, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.

18 Thompson, Voice of the Fast.

19 Ken Worpole, ‘A ghostly pavement: the political implications of local
working-class history’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and
Socialist Theory, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981, p. 28.

20 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning
of Oral and Public History, State University of New York Press,

1990.

21 Stephen Koss, review of Paul Thompson’s The Edwardians in Times
Literary Supplement, 5 December 1975, p. 1436.

22 Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology, Open Books, 1982, p. 331.

23 White, Rothschild Buildings, p. xiii.

24 For a small-scale but promising example of this approach, see
Tottenham History Workshop, How Things Were: Growing Up in
Tottenham 1890-1920, 1982.

25 Luisa Passerini, ‘Work ideology and consensus under Italian Fascism’,
in Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (eds), The Oral History
Reader, 2nd edn, Routledge, 2006, pp. 53-62.

26 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories:
Form and Meaning in Oral History, State University of New York
Press, 1991, p. 26.

27 Jay Winter, ‘The memory boom in contemporary historical studies’,
Raritan, XXI, 2001, pp. 52-66; Paula Hamilton, ‘Sale of the century?
Memory and historical consciousness in Australia’, in Kate Hodgkin
and Susannah Radstone, Contested Pasts: the Politics of Memory,
Routledge, 2003, pp. 136-52.

28 Graham Dawson, Making Peace With the Past ? Memory, Trauma
and the Irish Troubles, Manchester University Press, 2007.

29 Hodgkin and Radstone, Contested Pasts, editors’ introduction, p. 2.

30 Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. I: Past and Present in
Contemporary Culture, Verso, 1994.

31 Paula Hamilton, ‘Memory studies and cultural history’, in Hsu-
Ming Teo and Richard White (eds), Cultural History in Australia,
University of New South Wales Press, p. 96.

Conclusion

The last four chapters testify to an impressive diversification in the
scope of history. Underlying this diversity is a readiness to draw
on the theoretical insights of other disciplines, notably political
economy, anthropology, literary criticism and psychology. But my
survey is far from complete. Other new departures such as the use
of landscape and material culture as historical sources, the history
of the body and the history of the book, have been only lightly
touched on in this book, because until now their impact has not
been so pronounced; but in a comprehensive survey each would
merit extended discussion. Together all these innovations amount
to the most significant methodological advance since Ranke laid
the foundations of modern historical scholarship more than a
century-and-a-half ago. As a result the content of historical study
has been vastly extended, too. It now embraces social structures
in their entirety, the history of collective mentalities, and the
evolving relationship between society and the natural environ-
ment. Although much further work remains to be done, women
are now more present in the historical record than they have ever
been. And for the first time historical research now extends to
every corner of the globe; no culture is deemed too remote or too
‘primitive’ for the attention of historians.

Has history surrendered?

This record of innovation over the past fifty years is open to dif-
ferent readings. It can be seen as a surrender by historians to the
promise of topicality offered by other, more ‘relevant’ disciplines
- a line of attack that Elton made very much his own . 1 According
to this view, every enlargement of history’s scope represents a
departure from the central concern of the discipline (for Elton
this remained the constitutional and administrative history of
England). To the extent that the current turn to cultural themes is

CONCLUSION

3 3 1

associated with a Postmodernist epistemology, it invites dire warn-
ings of the end of history . 2 A more optimistic and generous verdict
would cite the occasions in the past when historians have suc-
cessfully assimilated the insights of other disciplines, for example
philology and the law in the nineteenth century. Everything
depends on whether openness to contributions from elsewhere is
compatible with upholding the essentials of historical awareness.
There is certainly a danger that overarching social theories may
obscure the particularity of the past, or that textual theory may
wrench primary sources from their historical context, or that
oral history may unwittingly read present-day attitudes into the
remembered past. But these dangers are well understood, and one
of the things that this book has sought to demonstrate is how his-
torians, forearmed with that awareness, have successfully resisted
the less digestible implications of innovations from outside the
discipline. One thinks of E.P. Thompson’s long campaign against
the determinist tendencies of Marxism, or the carefully qualified
welcome given to modern textual theory by Appleby, Elunt and
Jacob . 3 A great deal of the excitement of historical study derives
from its pivotal position where the concerns of many other fields
converge. Elistorians make those concerns their own by submit-
ting them to the disciplines of historical context and historical
process. They relinquish those intellectual positions that stand
above or outside history; the rest they assimilate, and in so doing
enrich the subject beyond measure.

A fragmented discipline?

But the enlargement in the scope of historical enquiry presents one
undeniable problem: history has become a discipline with very
little apparent coherence. During the nineteenth century it was
possible in practice to fence off history from other disciplines and
to confine its brief to the narrative presentation of political events.
The rise of economic history in the early twentieth century would
have imposed greater strain on this convention had it not been for
the fact that political and economic history tended to remain in
separate compartments. But today the situation is very different.
Not only has the range of approaches to the past expanded, with
the maturing of social history and the arrival of cultural history.
More and more research is conducted on the frontiers between
thematic specialisms, and the traditional claim of political history

3 3 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

to be the core of the subject is almost impossible to sustain any
longer; history has become a house of many mansions, with
numerous doors and passageways inside.

History has always been inimical to the definitions of the
logician. But now more than ever it can only be adequately char-
acterized in terms of paired opposites. It concerns both events and
structures, both the individual and the mass, both mentalities and
material forces. Historians themselves need to combine narrative
with analytical skills, and to display both empathy and detach-
ment. Their discipline is both re-creation and explanation, both
art and science; in short - to return to one of the starting-points
of this book - history is a hybrid which defies classification. These
distinctions should be seen not as warring opposites but as com-
plementary emphases, which together hold out the possibility of
grasping the past in something like its real complexity. Nothing
is to be gained from defining history in terms of lucid absolutes -
except perhaps rhetorical support for some new approach whose
credentials have yet to be established. A great deal will be lost if,
in the interests of a spurious coherence, historians close their eyes
to whole dimensions of their subject.

The purposes of history

Last but not least, the diversity of current practice reflects a
central ambivalence in the function of history. For as long as
men and women retain any interest in human nature and human
creativity, they will recognize that every manifestation of the
human spirit in the past has some claim on their attention, and
that history is worth studying as an end in itself. Some of the
new approaches during the past fifty years are recognizably part
of this humanistic tradition. The study of collective mentalities is
concerned in the first instance to re-create the emotions and intel-
lect of people living in conditions very different from our own,
so that their humanity can be more fully realized. Oral historians
in Britain and other industrialized societies are committed to the
recovery of everyday experience in the recent past as something
of value in itself.

But the innovative strain in recent historiography has also
been strongly influenced by the conviction that the record of the
past holds lessons for contemporary society. The almost total
retreat from topical concerns which characterized the historical

CONCLUSION

3 3 3

profession in the first half of the twentieth century has ended.
Quietly but persistently, historians are now reasserting their
subject’s claim to offer guidance and perspective. The theories
of social structure and social change which historians have
drawn from the social sciences were originally propounded by
thinkers such as Marx and Weber as a contribution to contem-
porary problems; it is no accident that they have been applied
with such interesting results to areas such as urban history and
the history of the family, which directly address contemporary
problems today. The history of policy-making in topical areas
like health and criminal justice is intended to broaden the
awareness of options and constraints among today’s politicians. 4
Macro-economic history, and the quantitative methods that it
has brought to greater sophistication than any other branch
of history, is principally concerned to explore the dynamics of
growth and stagnation in national economies. Looking further
afield, the study of African history bears witness to a widespread
sense in the 1960s that a new force had arrived on the world
stage and that almost nothing was known of its antecedents.

macro-economic

Concerned with the large
study of economies, on a
national or international
level.

History for all?

Of course if historians are to fulfil their potential as providers of
social wisdom, they must reach out to a popular audience. On this
count the profession is much given to pessimism. Historians in
Britain periodically lament their loss of lay appeal and look back
fondly to a time when their predecessors were widely read - even
if their books were short on scholarship. David Cannadine, for
example, has testified to his colleagues’ ‘intellectual timidity and
antiquarian pedantry’; qualities which in his view have driven
away readers and students alike. 5 It is certainly true that the relent-
less pursuit of academic recognition makes little allowance for a
non-professional audience, but in fact this self-defeating attitude
is far from universal among historians. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century it is clear that in Britain history is enjoying a
revival of popularity, spear-headed by such accomplished commu-
nicators as Simon Schama and David Starkey. Their works set a
high premium on entertainment, consistent with their prominence
in the television schedules. Of greater significance in the long run
are those historians who seek to present major historical themes
to a lay audience. One has only to call to mind Olwen Hufton’s

334

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

panorama of women’s experience in early modern Europe, or Eric
Elobsbawm’s sobering and wide-ranging reflections on the ‘short’
twentieth century . 6 Elistorians with a message have not been con-
fined to the ivory tower in the past, and there is no reason why
they should be in future.

What gives most cause for optimism about the future of histor-
ical studies is that more and more historians are now investigating
themes of topical relevance. They do so not as a propaganda exer-
cise, but in the conviction that there are valuable insights to be
learnt from the findings of historical scholarship. No doubt those
insights are less clear-cut than the champions of ‘scientific history’
would care to admit. If society looks to historians for ‘answers’
in the sense of firm predictions and unequivocal generalizations,
it will be disappointed. What will emerge from the pursuit of
‘relevance’ is something less tangible but in the long run more
valuable - a surer sense of the possibilities latent in our present
condition. For as long as historians hold that end in view, their
subject will retain its vitality and its claim on the support of the
society in which they work.

Notes

1 See especially G.R. Elton, Return to Essentials, Cambridge University
Press, 1991.

2 Ibid.; Arthur Marwick, ‘Two approaches to historical study’, Journal
of Contemporary History, XXX, 1995, pp. 5-35.

3 E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory , Merlin, 1978; Joyce
Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About
History, Norton, 1994.

4 See the papers posted on the historyandpolicy.org website.

5 David Cannadine, ‘British history: past, present - and future?’, Past
& Present, CXVI, 1987, p. 178.

6 Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Western
Women, 1500-1800, HarperCollins, 1995; Eric Hobsbawm, Age of
Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, Michael Joseph,
1994.

Index

Abrams, Philip 222-3, 321
abstract theory, necessity for 215-16
abstraction 167, 216
academic history 22, 48, 65, 79,
162, 168

and biography 67
and oral history 303-4, 326
and postcolonialism 297
qualities of a historian 166-7
academic monograph 159-60
access, restrictions on 112-14
Acton, Lord William 99, 123,

161, 181

adaptation of history 201-2
administrative history 63
aesthetic choices 199
Africa:

and independence 299
and oral history 305, 306, 307
African diaspora 289
African history 16, 49, 134, 162,
190, 291-2, 303, 333
as part of European expansion
189-90

African nationalism 41
Afrocentrism 43, 289
ahistorical approach 224
anachronism 9
analysis 164, 170
of history 229
multi-layered 153-4
of sources 122-4
analytical history 156-8, 182-3
analytical skills 332
Ancient Society 229
Anderson, Benedict 264
Anderson, Michael 159, 298
’angel mother’ 276
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 94
Anglo-Zulu War 47

Annales school 66-7, 76, 156,
163, 234, 259, 268
anthropology 36
of mentality 265-7
anti-colonial nationalism 41
Appleby, Joyce 205-6, 331
archives 90, 97, 110-12
colonial 296-7
government 99, 113
National Archives 128, 131
arms race 39
art history 247, 248-51
Asquith, H.H. 105-6
assumptions 13, 190
culture-bound 129
questioning of 42-3
asymmetric ignorance 296
attitudes 247
Australian history 323-4
authenticity 124-6
authorship of sources 93
autobiographies 95-6, 129, 130,
316

autonomy of the past 13
avant-garde thinking 31
awareness, historical 1-25, 32
conventional version,
challenging of 21-2
dismissal of the past: history as
progress 19-20
Enlightenment and the
Romantics 25

historical continuum 11-12
historicism: liberating past from
present 6-7

myths of popular history 23-4
nationalism, invented traditions
of 15-17
nostalgia 17-19
’otherness’ 8-11

336

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

periods of history 24-5
and popular social memory 13
tradition, distorting effects of
13-14

see also social memory

background causes 153
Bailyn, Bernard 77
Balfour Declaration on the future
of Palestine 131-2
Bann, Stephen 250
Baroque 253

Barraclough, Geoffrey 50
Barthes, Roland 196, 197
Bayeux Tapestry 251-3
Bayly, C.A. 80
Becker, Carl M. 193
behaviour, understanding of 36-8
beliefs 76, 306

Bhabha, Homi 287, 290, 295
bias 68, 92, 130, 180, 190
biographies 67-9, 73, 134, 151,
260

Black history 5, 192
see also African history
black identity 43
Bloch, Marc 66, 93, 124, 138,
160, 185, 202, 250, 262
Blue Books 107, 133
body, history of 67
Bonfire Night 310
books 93
history of 67

Braudel, Fernand 83, 150, 163,
164, 228, 234, 268
British Constitution 142-3
British Foreign Office 120
British history, postcolonial
reappraisal of 293-6
British Library 109
Sound Archive 315
British rule in Palestine 143
Britishness 42, 294, 295
broadsheets 93
Burckhardt, Jakob 188
Burke, Peter 21-2, 247-8, 250

Burton, Antoinette 293
Bury, J.B. 191
business history 75-6
Butterfield, Herbert 21, 191-2,
210

Cabinet Secretariat 100, 113
Caesar, Julius 94, 115
calculation, deliberate 69
’calendars’ 110
Camden, William 122
Camisard revolt (France) 308-9
Cannadine, David 47, 333
Capitalist (modern bourgeois)
Society 229

Carlyle, Thomas 8, 149
Carr, E.H. 20, 39-40, 53, 152,
177, 183, 199

categorization of history 58-84
Annales school 66-7
biography 67-9
economic history 74
economic history and political
history, interplay of 75
elite, history beyond the 65-6
enterprise and economic growth
75-6

globalization 80-1
Hegel and dialectic 84
local history 81-2
microhistory and total history
82-3

political history 59-60, 63-5
subject matter 61-3
in turbulent times 60-1
religious history 77-8
social history 70-2
social structure 72-3
Tudor inflation 84
world history 79
causation 153, 157, 187
cause and consequence, patterns
of 205

cause and effect, patterns of 167
causes, historical 151-2
causes, latent 152-3

INDEX

3 3 7

celebratory history 15
censorship 133

censuses 96, 101, 110, 139-40
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 296, 297
Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri 287,
297

Chancery 99

change, historical 216, 217
Chartism 276
Chaucer, Geoffrey 98
chemical testing 125
chimera 50
Christian art 253
chronicles 94-5, 98, 129
Church courts 101-2
Church records 101-2, 103, 108
Churchill, Winston 16, 38, 95
civil registration 101
Clapham, J.H. 76, 233
Clark, T.J. 249, 252
Clarke, Peter 238
class 72-3
conflict 230-1
consciousness 267-8
classical tradition of Greece and
Rome 33

classification 92-3
Clerk of the Peace 102
Clio (muse) 168-9
Cliometrics 224
’closed period’ 113
Cobb, Richard 46, 52-3, 120,
137-8, 142, 167-8, 189
Cobbett, William 44
Cole, G.D.H. 71
collaborative history 160-2
collective memory 1, 2, 303,
304-5, 312, 313, 323, 326
and commemorative ritual
309-10

moral power of 308
collective mentalities 268, 332
collective subconscious 271
Colley, Linda 69

Collingwood, R.G. 179, 186, 194
colonial archives 296-7

colonial immigrants in Britain 295
Colonial Office files 133
colonialism, end of 286
commemorative ritual 15, 309-10
Communism, fall of 236-9
comparability 139-40
comparative history 164-6, 239
comparative method 79
comparison across time 34
complexity 153
composition 167
Comte, Auguste 178, 223
conceptualization 167
confessional mode 207
confidentiality 112-13
conflict of memories 325
connectedness of aspects of daily
life 316-17

Connell-Smith, Gordon 193
consciousness 6, 23, 267-8, 323,
325

consensus, impossibility of 186-7
consequences, historical 151-2
consequences, long-term 152-3
conservation of documents
109-12

conservatism 48, 190, 220-1
consistency with known facts 125
constitutional history 62-3, 215
constructions 326
consumption, history of 78
contemporary history, necessity
for 52

context 32, 68, 126-7, 131-2,
189-91, 204-5
awareness 11
and behaviour 36-8
causes and consequences 152
intertexuality: text and context
196-7

search for origins 191
self-awareness and peer review
208

continuum, historical 11-12
conventional version, challenging
of 21-2

338

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

conversion 78
copyright libraries 109
cost-of-living index 140
Cotton, Sir Robert 114
county record offices 112
court records 101-2, 103, 136-7
Cowling, Maurice 68
Crimea 97

critical approach 123
Crossman, Richard 107
Cubitt, Geoffrey 23
cultural anthropology 215
cultural evidence and the cultural
turn 246-71

Annales school: historical
psychology 259
anthropology 265-7
art history 248-51
Bayeux Tapestry 251-3
benefits and limitations of
cultural agenda 269-70
Freud and psychoanalysis
270-1

Freud and psychohistory

259- 60

impact of cultural turn 267-9
linguistic discourse and
language of politics 263-4
literary theory 262
photography and film 255-7
popular culture: pre-literate and
modem 253-5
psychohistory, objections to
261-2

psychology of the collective

260- 1

writing cultural history 257-8
cultural hegemony and language
202-3

cultural history 67, 136, 203,

215, 248, 268-9, 331
of meaning 280-1
and women’s history 284
cultural insiderism 43
cultural memory, oral history as
323-5

cultural parochialism 262
cultural turn 280-1

acknowledgement of and
postcolonial history 297-8
see also cultural evidence and
cultural turn
culturalism 235
culture 15
high 247, 253, 254
low 254

popular 247, 253-5

daily life, connectedness of aspects
of 316-17
Dalton, Hugh 106
Darnton, Robert 266, 267
Davidoff, Leonore 280
Davis, Natalie Zemon 158, 264,
266

Dawson, Graham 325
Death in Paris 46
Declaration of Independence 24
deconstruction 196-8, 202-4,

208, 262

dedicatory clause 136
deductive reasoning 209
Derrida, Jacques 196
description 153, 164
history as 149-50
detachment 332

determinism 31, 219-20, 228-9, 232
dialectic in production and social
change 230

diaries 93, 98, 99, 106-7, 108,
113

Dickens, Charles 98
difference 9, 10, 32, 33, 35-6
sexual 279, 280, 281
see also ’Otherness’
diplomacy 108

diplomatic history 61, 100-1,

151, 193
Diplomatics 125
direct causes 153
discourse 132, 196-7, 202,

263-4, 282

INDEX

3 3 9

reverse 43, 289
see also deconstruction
dismissal of the past: history as
progress 19-20
distortion 68, 92, 95, 129-30,
132, 134, 208

incomplete or tainted record
180

search for origins 191
Divine Providence 19, 30
documentary film 256
documentary material 88-116
access, restrictions on 112-14
archives 110-12
Church records 101-2
conservation and publication
109-10
diaries 106-7

literature as source material 98
local government and private
firms 102-4

Namier, Sir Lewis 115-16
narratives and memoirs 93-6
official papers and newspapers
96-7

primary and secondary sources
91-3

private papers 104-6
record sources 98-9
Roman historians 115
satire as a source 115
specialist sources and skills 89
State records 99-101
survival of sources 108-9
unearthing source material
114-16

written word 90-1
Domesday Book 127, 131, 148
Donation of Constantine 124-5
Duby, Georges 268
Dunkirk 23

economic history 67, 74, 157,
179, 224, 233-4, 331
and Annales school 66
and business history 76

and history of consumption 78
London School of Economics
66

and political history 65, 75
and social structure 73
economism 235
ego 270-1
elegiac tone 70
elite, history beyond the 65-6
Elliott, J.H. 165-6
Elton, G.R. 45-6, 163, 176, 183,
193-4, 330

emancipatory potential 205
empathy 8, 9, 13, 168, 178-9,
186, 258, 332
and cultural heritage 52
and economic history 74
and political history 193
empirical method 177
Engels, Friedrich 227, 228-9,
241-2

Engerman, S.L. 224
English Civil War 54, 184-5,
240-1

English Revolution 47, 54, 263
Enlightenment 19, 20, 25, 30, 60
enterprise and economic growth
75-6

environmental history 67
epistemological credentials 206
essentialism 15, 16
establishment opinion 97
ethnic identity 43
Eurocentrism 10
European history 161
Evans, Richard J. 51, 158, 206
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 221-2,

265

Evelyn, John 106
evidence 261

deliberate removal of 132-3
unwitting 136-8
see also cultural evidence
experience 168-71, 268
explanation, necessity for 205-6
explanatory mode 270

340

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

explicit theory 223

external criticism see authenticity

facts 182-3

selection and rejection 183-4
familiarity 34-5

family history 11, 34, 41-2, 191,
276, 298-9, 333
Fascism 31
feature films 256-7
Febvre, Lucien 66, 159, 259
feelings 178

feminism 5-6, 203, 238, 275,

276, 280

see also women’s history
Fentress, James 305
Feudal Society 229
fields of study, relevant 48-50
Figes, Orlando 150
film 255-7
financial houses 108
First World War, origins of 170-1
first-hand memories 313-14
first-person verbatim reporting see
memory and oral history
Fischer, Fritz 171
Fitzpatrick, David 105
Fogel, R.W. 224
forces of production (productive
forces) 227, 228, 230, 231,
232, 234
Ford, Henry 29
forgeries 124-5, 132
’forgetting’ 35-6
forms of historical writing 149
Forster, E.M. 129
Foucault, Michel 44, 197, 198,
287

foundation myth 4
Founding Fathers 4
fragmentation 162, 331-2
France 66

see also French Revolution
free will 31

Freedom of Information Act
(1975) 113

Freeman, E.A. 61
French Revolution 8, 25, 31, 32,
46, 48, 64

British reactions to 92
linguistic discourse 263
Freud, Sigmund 259-60, 261,
270-1

Frisch, Michael 319
Froissart, Jean 94

Galbraith, V.H. 45-6, 100, 148
gay history 282
Gay, Peter 260
Geertz, Clifford 266
gender history 44, 274-85
cultural creation of gender
281-2

and cultural history of meaning
280-1

and family history 298-9
Hufton, Olwen: The Prospect
Before Her 277
and Marxist theory 279-80
and new polarities of power
282-5

and relations between the sexes
279

see also women’s history
generalization 221-2
Genovese, Eugene 237
gentry controversy 73
Gerald of Wales 94-5, 129
German historicism 60-1
German identity 42-3
Germanic Society 229
Germany 54-5

Gibbon, Edward 60, 123, 168
Gilroy, Paul 294
Gladstone, William Ewart 106
glasnost (’openness’) 36
global history 67, 80-1, 83
see also world history
Gorbachev, Mikhail 36
Gordon Riots (1780) 71
government see State
Gramsci, Antonio 292

INDEX

341

grand narratives 201, 268, 296
Grayzel, Susan 165
Greven, Philip 260-1
grievance 320
group consciousness 325
grouping, patterns of 167
Guha, Ranajit 292-3
Guicciardini, Francesco 38, 45,
123

Gulf War 37

Haley, Alex 306-7
Hall, Catherine 280, 294
Hansard, Thomas 96, 128
Hardy, Thomas 96
Harris, Jose 161
Hartley, L.P. 9
Haute vulgarisation 162
Havelock, Sir Henry 311-12
Hegel, GW.F. 60, 84, 219
hegemonic ideology 199
heritage 17-18
Herodotus 314
heroism 4-5
Hewitt, Margaret 70
hidden traces in records 135-6
high culture 247, 253, 254
Hill, Christopher 33-4, 54, 233,
237, 240

Hilton, Rodney 237
hindsight 194

histoire evenementielle, l’ 156,

164

Historical Manuscripts
Commission 114
historicism 1, 7, 21, 23, 47, 179,
194, 219

and academic history 45
and awareness 13
cultural differences 258
cultural turn 270
and the Enlightenment 20
and the French Revolution 32,
48

German 60-1

liberating past from present 6-7

and nostalgia 17
and Postmodernism 205
and process 40
and relativism 193, 201
and scientific method 195
historicity 204
historiography 65, 292, 332
British 157
Marxist 238, 240
nineteenth-century 227
oral history 305
reactive 192
Western 297
see also writing and
interpretation
history from above 236
history from below 236, 292
history for its own sake 45-7, 194
History and Policy website 51-2
History Workshop Journal 5
History Workshop movement
71-2, 317

Hitler, Adolph 68-9
Hitler diaries 124-5
Hobbes, Thomas 77, 132
Hobsbawm, E.J. 37, 39
Age of Revolution 161
haute vulgarisation 162
Interesting Times 236
Marxist perspective 233, 234,
237

’short’ twentieth century 25,

234

Holocaust denial 209
Holocaust historicity 5 1
horizontal (synchronic) plane 154
Hoskins, W.G. 48, 82, 83
Houlbrook, Matt 282
Howard, Michael 190
Hufton, Olwen 277, 333-4
human history 30
Hume, David 19
Hunt, Lynn 205-6, 331
hypotheses 214
historical 184-5
multiplicity 187-8

342

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

iconography 249, 250
id 270

idealism 178-9, 186
ideas, history of 77
identity 280
black 43
ethinic 43
historical 71
racial 43
sexual 282

see also national identity
ideology 228

imagination 1, 35, 167-8, 185-6
immemorialism 15
immigrant communities, history
of 72

imperialism 254-5
impressions 326
inaccuracies 134
India 293, 297
individual recall 326
individuals 222-3
inductive reasoning 177, 209
industrial capitalism 30
Industrial Revolution 12, 42, 72,
73, 74, 104
inference 180, 182
insight 168-9
instinct 141-3, 167, 258
intentions 69, 129, 178
inter-relatedness 215
internal criticism see
interpretation

international relations history
135

internationalism 49
Internet 97, 109, 110
interpretation 10, 90-1, 93,
126-7, 189, 192-3
and language 196
of meaning 258
plurality 208
value judgements 190
see also writing and
interpretation
intertextuality 196-7, 198

intuition 178-9, 186, 258
Irving, David 51

Jacksonian America 261
Jacob, Margaret 206, 331
James, Harold 49
Jeffreys, Lord Chancellor George
132

Jenkins, Keith 199
Jenkins, Roy 38
jingoism 254

Johnson, Dr Samuel 166, 167
Joll, James 36, 152
Jordanova, Ludmilla 10
journalists’ copy 97
Joyce, Patrick 269
judicial records 102
Jung, Carl Gustav 271
Justices of the Peace 102

Kershaw, Ian 68-9
King’s Secretary (Secretary of
State) 99-100

knowledge, limits of 175-210
adaptation of history 201-2
consensus, impossibility of

186- 7

context 189-91

explanation, necessity for 205-6
facts in history 182-4
hindsight 194
Holocaust denial 209
hypotheses, historical 184-5
hypotheses, multiplicity of

187- 8

idealism: intuition and empathy
178-9

imagination, importance of
185-6

incomplete and tainted records
180-1

inductive reasoning 209
interpretation 192-3
intertextuality: text and context
196-7

language 195-6

INDEX

343

and cultural hegemony 202-3
negation of history 198-9
origins, search for 191-2
past, unattainability of 193-4
positivism: induction from facts
178

Postmodernism 195
in context 200
limitations 203-5
precursors 200-1
reactive historiography 192
records, surfeit of 181-2
relativism 197-8
science and history 177
scientific method, understanding
of 185

selection 188-9

self-awareness and peer review
207-8

theoretical objections and
practical answers 206-7
Whig history 210
Kraditor, Aileen 218
Kunta Kinte 306-7

labour history 5, 21-2, 276
Lacan, Jacques 282
language 195-6, 201-2, 269, 282,
283, 287

and cultural hegemony 202-3
materiality and arbitrariness
262

nature of and extent of bearing
on real world 177
of politics and linguistic
discourse 263-4
and Postmodernism 203
and relativism 197
theories 127
Laslett, Peter 34, 190
Last Judgement 30
latent history 152, 157
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel 82,
121, 137, 162
Lefebvre, Georges 237
legal history 63, 136-7

legal records 103
’Leicester school’ of historians 82
letters 93, 98, 99, 108
of remission 264
Levine, David 82
Lewis, Jane 278
liberal historians 190
literacy, mass 254
literary skills 168-9
literary theory 215, 262
literature as source material 98
Lloyd, Howell 193
local government records 102-4
local history 48, 74, 79, 81-2, 83,
317-18

local memory 307-9
local public records 113
London School of Economics 66
long term plane/register 164
Loyola, Ignatius 77
Luther, Martin 77, 253

Mabillon, Jean 122-3
Macaulay, Thomas Babington 45,
92, 149

Machiavelli, Niccolo 38, 77
McKibbin, Ross 257
Macmillan, Margaret 61-2
macro-economic history 333
Mafia 24
Malcolm X 5, 24
Mandela, Nelson 54
Mandler, Peter 46
Mandrou, Robert 259
manifest history 152, 157
manipulated memory 326
manuscript (unpublished) source
93

March, Elizabeth 69
Marwick, Arthur 314
Marx, Karl 54, 65, 84, 151, 225,
230, 241-2, 333
analysis of history 229
analysis of society 227-8
critique of historians 232
postcolonialism 286

344

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Marxism 30, 31, 54, 67, 215,

223, 239, 331

cultural evidence and cultural
turn 248, 267-8
culturalism versus economism
235

and fall of Communism 236-9
and gender history 279-80
historical hypotheses 184-5
historiography 240
impact 233-4

incomplete or tainted records
180

social analysis, usefulness of
234

social structure 72
and synthesis 163
theory, basis of 226-7
working class 235-6
Marxist history 226, 292
masculinity 44, 278
material culture 251
materialism 30, 78, 227, 233
Mathias, Peter 217
Matrimonial Causes Act (1857)

41

Mayhew, Henry 97
Mazlish, Bruce 260
meanings 127, 203, 215, 216-17,
268-9, 270, 282
counter-currents 202
cultural history of 280-1
and culture 247-8
economic history 74
implicit or unconscious 202
incomplete and tainted record
180

and language 196
and literary theory 264
and relativism 197
mediation of Christ 136
medieval chronicles 92
Medieval history 112, 125-6, 237
medium term plane/register 164
memoirs 93-6, 98, 113
memorandums 93, 98-9

memorial culture 325
memory and oral history 303-27,
332

collection 327
commemorative ritual and
collective memory 309-10
conflict of memories 325
cultural memory 323-5
democratic tendency 319, 321
first-hand memory 313-14
interpretation 291, 307, 322-3
limitations 321
local history 317-18
local memory 307-9
manipulated memory 326
monuments and statues 311-13
national memory 307-9
necessity for oral history 315
ordinary peoples’ narratives
315-16

pedigree of oral history 314

pitfalls 319-21

politics 324

populist tendency 321

as re-creation 319

role of oral tradition 305-7

and social memory 23

societies 327

spontaneous memory 326
see also awareness, historical;
collective memory; social
memory

mentalities 9, 76, 78, 93, 95,
167, 178

anthropology of 265-7
collective 268, 332
history of 162, 259
meta-narrative 206
metahistory 30, 31-2
methodology 141-3
Michelet, Jules 314
microhistory 82-3
micronarratives 158
Middle Ages 17-18, 20, 24, 25,
67, 94, 101, 124
Middle East 287-8

INDEX

345

Mill, James 260
Mill, John Stuart 260
Miller, Joseph 186
minutes 98-9
modern history 10
modernism 31-2, 200
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo 257
’molly house’ sub-culture 3
Monumenta Germaniae Historica
series 109-10
monuments 311-13
Morrison, Herbert 315
motive 69, 75, 151, 167
multicultural history 203
myopia 18

myths of popular history 23-4

Namier, Sir Lewis 63-4, 114,
115-16, 157, 183, 184-5
narrative 93-6, 153, 164, 205,
206, 270, 332

and analysis, combination of
170

author influences 129
grand 268, 296
history as 150-1
limitations 154-6
micronarratives 158
national 4
parallel 165
political 179
private 105

and social history 158-9
standardized 323-4
suspension 157
nation-state 79, 297
National Archives 128, 131
national days 309-10
national history 80
national identity 15, 16-17, 43,
263-4

national libraries 113-14
national memory 307-9
nationalism 17, 25, 46, 61, 64
African 41
anti-colonial 41

invented traditions of 15-17
’natural’, challenging notions of
43-4

natural sciences 188
Nazi historians 46, 191
Nazism 31

necessity to write history 147-9
negation of history 198-9
neo-colonialism 287
New Deal administration 256
’New History’ 49, 65-6, 67
newspapers 93, 96-7, 98, 130
newsreels 256
nonsectarian approach 21
Nora, Pierre 312
nostalgia 17-19, 20, 48, 320

Oakeshott, Michael 45
objective history 232
occupational schedule 140
official correspondence 98-9
official papers 96-7
official publications 98
officially published records 133
O’Gorman, Frank 25
Oldknow, Samuel 104
Olympian impartiality 8
open aristocracy 73
oral history see memory and oral
history

Orientalism 288, 290, 294, 296, 299
origins, search for 191-2
’othering’ 281-2
’otherness’ 8-11, 39, 288
overview 160
Owenism 276

paired opposites 67, 332
Palacky, Frantisek 15
palaeographer 125-6
Palestine 133, 143
Panofsky, Erwin 249
Paris, Matthew 94, 129
Parliament 14, 62
parliamentary proceedings reports
96

346

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

parliamentary speeches 98
Passerini, Luisa 324
past, unattainability of 193-4
patriarchy 5-6, 275, 278
patriotism 264
Pedersen, Susan 165, 284
peer review 207-8
People’s Autobiography of
Hackney 319
Pepys, Samuel 106
periodization 10, 24-5, 167, 229
personal development of
individuals 69
personality 75
philanthropy 70
philologist 125-6
photography 255-7
Pimlott, Ben 106
Pinchbeek, Ivy 70
Pipe Rolls of the Exchequeur 99
place and community, sense of
317
Plato 77
Plumb, J.H. 20
pluralism 205
Pocock, J.G.A. 132
police records 103
political arrangements 306
political cartoons 251
political history 59-60, 77, 179,
193, 215, 228, 270, 331-2
British 68
cultural turn 267
diaries 107

and economic history 74, 75
government policy 135
government records 100
and Marxist social analysis 234
and oral history 315
and private papers 105-6
and secular clergy 94
and social structure 73
subject matter 61-3
in turbulent times 60-1
and women’s history 276
political narrative 179

Popper, Karl 185
popular consciousness 23, 323
popular culture 247
pre-literate and modern 253-5
Portelli, Alessandro 324
Porter, Roy 258
positivism 179, 181, 182, 185,
188-9, 195, 206
induction from facts 178
post hoc propter hoc fallacy 155
Postan, M.M. 183, 221
Postcolonial history 203, 285-99
British history, Postcolonial
reappraisal of 293-6
cultural turn, acknowledgement
of 297-8

new paradigm 285-7
Orientalism 299
problems and obstacles 296-7
race and racism 289-90
South Asia and Africa and
independence 299
Subaltern Studies 292-3
theory 292

Third World and Western
theorists 287-8

Postmodernism 205, 206, 268,

269

challenge of 195
in context 200
cultural turn 298
and deconstruction 196
epistemology 331
Foucault, Michel 197
language and cultural hegemony
202

limitations 203-5
negation of history 199
oral history 326
precursors 200-1
and relativism 198
and social memory 22
power 197, 287, 288, 298
new polarities 282-5
precedent 38-40
prejudices 129, 130

INDEX

347

premise 209

present-mindedness/presentism
20, 21, 191-2, 199, 208
primary sources 91-3, 131, 135,
147, 148, 161, 167, 179
analysis 122-4
Bayeux Tapestry 252
comparative history 165
critical method 178
incomplete or tainted record
180-1

literary theory 262
monographs 159
narratives and memoirs 93
negation of history 198
newspapers 96
oral history 305, 313, 314
photography and film 256
relativism 197
social theory 239
printing 90, 96, 253
private firms’ records 102-4
private letters 108
private manuscript collections
113-14

private papers 104-6
problem-oriented approach 120-1
process 11-12, 20, 32, 40-2,
162-3

and synthesis 163
professionalization of history 45,
159

progress, history as 19-20
proletariat 231

propaganda 46, 114, 191, 251-4,
257

prosopography 116
Prospect Before Her, The 111
provenance see authenticity
psychoanalysis 168, 215, 270-1, 282
psychohistory 259-62
psychological anachronism 259
psychology of the collective 260-1
public history 50-2
Public Record Office (National
Archives) 111-12, 120, 132

public records 108, 135
published sources 93, 109-10
Purkiss, Diane 150
purposes of history 332-3

qualities of a historian 166-7
quantitative data 138
quantitative history 140

race and racism 15, 43, 129, 261,
289-90, 294-5
racial identity 43
racial stereotypes 296
racialisation of the London poor
295

radical history 190, 192
Ranke, Leopold von 7, 8, 20, 23,
189, 219, 232

analysing sources 123-4, 157
government records 100-1
intuition and empathy 179
political history 61
postcolonialism 285
record sources 98
technique and intuition 258
weighing sources against each
other 134

re-creative mode 270
reactive historiography 192
reason, application of 205
records 90, 108

Church 101-2, 103, 108
county 112

court 101-2, 103, 136-7
incomplete and tainted 180-1
local government 102-4
local public 113
officially published 133
police 103
private firms 102-4
public 108, 135
royal courts 99
sources 94, 98-9
State 99-101, 103, 108
surfeit 181-2
reductionist history 240

348

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Reform Act (1832) 202
Reformation England 136
Reformation Germany 253-4
rejection of history 30-2
relatedness of events 167
relations of production

(productive relations) 227,
228, 230, 231, 232, 234
relativism 193, 197-8, 199, 201,
205

relevance, rejection of 47-8
reliability 92, 127-8, 129, 131,
139, 140

religious history 77-8
Renaissance 38, 54, 67, 108-9,
253

representation 215, 264, 268-9,
283

reverse discourse 43, 289
rhetorical choices 158
ritual 14, 15, 266, 267, 309-10
Roberts, Elizabeth 316
Rolls Series 110
Roman history 94, 115
Romantic movement 7, 17, 25
root-and-branch totalitarianism
31

Rosenstone, Robert 256
Royal Commissions 96, 130
royal courts records 99
Rude, George 71
Russell, W.H. 97

Said, Edward 203, 287-8, 290,
294, 296, 299
St Paul’s Cathedral 250-1
Samuel, Raphael 18-19, 22, 180,
197, 267, 317, 326
sati 297

satire as a source 115
Saussure, Ferdinand de 195-6,
262

Schama, Simon 150, 155-6, 333
Schorsk, Carl 154
scientific explanation 186
scientific history 177, 334

scientific method 185, 195
Scott, Joan 283, 297-8
Scott, Sir Walter 7
Scramble for Africa 12
Scribner, R.W. 253-4
scriptoria 126

Second Reform Act (1867) 131-2
secondary sources 91-3, 166, 184
selection 79, 188-9
self-awareness 45, 52, 168, 207-8
self-deception 69
self-identity of a group see social
memory

self-knowledge 207
sensationalism 129
sentiments 323
sequential prediction 40-2
sexual difference 277-8, 279, 280,
281

sexual identity 282
sexuality, history of 282
Sharpe, Kevin 263
short term plane/register 164
shorthand 128
’Sicilian Vespers’ 23-4
Skinner, Quentin 132
slavery, abolition of 152-3, 171
Smith, Adam 19, 223
Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 134-5
Snowman, Daniel 158
social anthropology 36
social arrangements 306
social change 73
social history 67, 70-2, 73, 179,
234, 331

and analytical history 157
and Annales school 66
cultural evidence and cultural
turn 248, 267
and family history 11
and legal history 136-7
local government and private
firms 102-3
and local history 82
mental disorders 258
and narratives 158-9

INDEX

349

and oral history 303, 317
and political history 65
and social memory 23
and women’s history 276, 277,
278, 284

social memory 1, 20, 21, 303-4
and creation of self-identity of
a group 3-5

and historical awareness in
opposition 13

and history, overlap between
22-3

of past oppression 5-6
social mobility 72
social sciences 66
social structure 72-3
social theory 214-42, 270
abstract theory, necessity for
215-16

and ’big questions’ of history
239-40

change, historical 216
class conflict 230-1
conservatism 220-1
determinism 219-20, 228-9
dialectic in production and
social change 230
Engels, Friedrich 241-2
English Civil War 240-1
generalization 221-2
individuals 222-3
meaning of history 216-17
rejection of theory 217-18
relevance to historical enquiry
219

safeguards against excessive
theorizing 218-19
social science, lessons from 223-5
Thompson, E.P.: The Making
of the English Working Class
241

see also Marx; Marxism
social time, plurality of 163-4
socialism 30
Socialist Society 229
society, analysis of 227-8

society, history of 73
source critic ( erudit ) 123
source-oriented approach 120-1,
148

sources: weighing of against each
other 134-5

see also in particular primary;
secondary
South Africa:

African National Congress 41
apartheid 54, 238
Truth and Reconciliation
Commission 40

South Asia and independence 299
Soviet historians 46
Soviet Union under Stalin 35-6
specialist sources and skills 89
specialization of locality 59
specialization of theme 59
specialization of time 58-9
Spiegel, Gabrielle 204
Spivak 297

spoken word see oral history
spontaneous memory 326
Spufford, Margaret 136
Starkey, David 333
State:

archives 99, 113
Papers 99-100, 113, 122, 132
records 99-101, 103, 108
Trials 133

statistical economic models 224
statistical evidence, analysis of 138
statistical evidence, unreliability of
138-40

statistics, compilation of 140-1
statues 311-13
Stedman Jones, Gareth 202
stereotypes 129

Stone, Lawrence 141, 153, 158-9
Strachey, Lytton 68
Stubbs, Bishop William 16, 63,
124, 142-3

stylistic permutations 199
Subaltern Studies 292-3, 297
subjectivity 280

350

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

Suetonius, Gaius 94, 115
Suez Crisis 133
suffrage movement 3, 275
super-ego 271
superficiality 191
superstructure 227, 228-9, 232,
234

suppression 324
surveys 160-2, 163
survival of sources 108-9
symbolic behaviour 266
symbolic overloading 267
synthesis 163, 165

Tacitus, Cornelius 94, 115
tainted sources 130
Tawney, R.H. 66, 155
Taylor, A.J.P. 154-6, 171, 220
technique 258
telegraph 97
television history 327
text and context 196-7
textual meaning 204
textual theory 268
Thane, Pat 35
Thatcher, Margaret 16, 22
thematic comparison 165
theory-oriented history 220
therapy, history as 35-6
’thick description’ 266
Third Reich 2, 35
Third World history 79, 238, 265,
286, 297

see also African history
Thomas, Keith 78, 265
Thompson, E.P. 237, 240, 292,
331

analytical history 157
local government and private
firms 103

methodology and instinct 141
social relations 190
The Making of the English
Working Class 73, 207,
235-6, 241

Thompson, Paul 317, 318

Thomson, Alistair 324
Thomson, David 219
Thucydides 314

Tocqueville, Alexis de 151, 170
topicality 49

total history 82-3, 216, 234
totalitarianism, defence against
30-1

trading companies 108
tradition 17, 20
distorting effects 13-14
-making 16

traditionalists 220-1, 225
trajectory of human history 30
Transformation: by peace and by
war 54-5

transience and enduring,

distinction between 34-5
Trastulli, Luigi 324
Treaty of Versailles 61-2
Trevelyan, G.M. 70, 169
Trevor-Roper, Hugh 124
tropes 199
Tudor inflation 84
tunnel vision 224

unearthing source material
114-16

unilinear time 163-4
Union of Scotland and England 42
United States 65-6
urban history 72-3, 333
use of sources 119-43
analysis 122-4
authenticity 124-6
bias 130

British rule in Palestine 143
context 131-2
different approaches 120-2
evidence, deliberate removal of
132-3

evidence, unwitting 136-8
hidden traces in records 135-6
interpretation 126-7
methodology and instinct 141-3
officially published records 133

INDEX

3 5 1

reliability 127-8
statistical evidence, analysis of
138

statistical evidence, unreliability
of 138-40

statistics, compilation of 140-1
Stubbs, Bishop William 142-3
weighing sources against each
other 134-5

writer intentions and prejudices
129-30

uses of history 29-55
analogies 38-40
assumptions, questioning of
42-3

contemporary history, necessity
for 52

context 36-8

cultural subject/social science
52-3

familiar, lessons from 34-5
fields of study, relevant 48-50
history for its own sake 45-7
inventory of alternatives 33-4
Marxism and the English
Revolution 54
metahistory - history as
long-term development 30
’natural’, challenging notions
of 43-4

public history 50-2
rejection of history 30-2
relevance, rejection of 47-8
Renaissance 54
sequential prediction 40-2
therapy, history as 35-6
Transformation: by peace and
by war 54-5

values 95, 190, 193-4, 306, 323
and culture 247-8
Vansina, Jan 307
verbal skills 168-9
Verney family 104-5
vertical (diachronic) plane 154
Vickery, Amanda 298-9

Victorian times 67-8
Vincent, David 95
Vinland Map forger 125
Voltaire, Francois Marie Arouet
de 19, 20, 60

Walker, Pamela 78
Walkowitz, Judith 283-4
Walter, Hubert 99
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice 66
Weber, Max 151, 225, 333
Wedgwood, C.V. 156, 169
Western historiography 297
Western history 79, 90, 121, 296
Western imperialism 37
Whig history 191-2, 210
White, Hayden 158, 198-9, 202
White, Jerry 317-18, 322
Whyman, Susan 104-5
Wickham, Chris 237-8, 305
Wilberforce, William 152, 171
Williams, Raymond 246
wills 102, 136
Wollstonecraft, Mary 294
women’s history 49, 72, 134, 192,
275-6

Women’s Liberation 275, 283
women’s movement 5
working class and Marxist theory
235-6

world history 79, 80, 92, 286
World Wars in Britain 308
Worpole, Ken 319
Wright, Donald 83-4
Wrightson, Keith 72, 82
writer intentions and prejudices
129-30

writing and interpretation 147-71
academic monograph 159-60
analysis, multi-layered 153-4
analytical history, strengths and
weaknesses of 156-8
causes and consequences,
historical 151-2
collaborative history 160-2
comparative history 164-6

3 5 2

THE PURSUIT OF HISTORY

description, history as 149-50
experience, breadth of 168-71
extended periods 163
First World War, origins of
170-1

forms of historical writing 149
imagination 167-8
latent causes and long-term
consequences 152-3
narrative, history as 150-1
narrative, limitations of 154-6
narratives and social history
158-9

necessity to write history 147-9
overview 160

process, historical 162-3
qualities of a historian 166-7
slavery, abolition of 171
social time, plurality of
163-4

synthesis 163

Tocqueville, Alexis de 170
written word 90-1

Young, Arthur 60
Young, G.M. 142

Zeldin, Theodore 33, 176, 179,
207

Zemon Davis, Natalie 33